annual and cropping season environmental production conditions effects on smallholder technical efficiency in sub saharan africa evidence from ethiopia this article investigates the impact of environmental production conditions on smallholder farmers technical efficiency in ethiopia for wheat maize and sorghum farming we use a household panel data set with annual and cropping season environmental production conditions to estimate the technical efficiency scores the results show that including environmental production conditions in the stochastic frontier has a significant impact on farmers technical efficiency scores technical efficiency scores improve when environmental production conditions are incorporated in the stochastic frontier thus accounting for environmental production conditions reduces the inefficiencies that otherwise may be attributed to the characteristics of smallholder farmers

asset prices credit and the business cycle abstract this paper uses the multivariate unobserved components model with phase shifts to analyse the interaction of interest rates output asset prices and credit in the us we find close linkages amongst cyclical fluctuations in the variables

monetary policy and macroprudential policy different and separate the paper discusses how monetary and macroprudential policies can be distinguished how appropriate goals for the two policies can be determined whether the policies are best conducted separately or coordinately and by the same or different authorities and how they can be coordinated when desired the institutional frameworks in canada sweden and the uk are briefly compared the swedish example of monetary policy strongly leaning against the wind and the subsequent policy turnaround is summarized as well as what estimates have been found of the costs and benefits of leaning against the wind politique monetaire et politique macro prudentielle differente et separee ce memoire se demande comment on peut distinguer les politiques monetaire et macro prudentielle comment on peut determiner les objectifs de ces deux politiques si ces deux politiques ont un meilleur impact separement ou coordonnees et mises en uvre par la meme ou differentes autorites et comment on peut les coordonner quand on le desire on compare succinctement les cadres institutionnels du canada de la suede et du royaume uni la politique monetaire suedoise va fortement a contre courant et le virage subsequent de la politique est resume ainsi que les couts et avantages de cette strategie

commodity price shocks and civil conflict evidence from colombia how do income shocks aect armed con ict theory suggests two op posite eects if labor is used to appropriate resources violently higher wages may lower con ict by reducing labor supplied to appropriation this is the opportunity cost eect alternatively a rise in contestable income may increase violence by raising gains from appropriation this is the rapacity eect our paper exploits exogenous price shocks in inter national commodity markets and a rich dataset on civil war in colombia to assess how dierent income shocks aect con ict we examine changes in the price of agricultural goods which are labor intensive and natural resources which are capital intensive we focus on coee and oil the two largest exports we nd that a sharp fall in coee prices in the 1990s increased violence dierentially in regions growing more coee by lower ing wages and the opportunity cost of joining armed groups in contrast a rise in oil prices increased violence dierentially in the oil region by in creasing municipal revenue siphoned through rapacity this pattern holds in several other agricultural and natural resource sectors providing robust evidence that price shocks aect con ict in opposite directions depending on the factor intensity of the commodity

why has u s inflation become harder to forecast we examine whether the u s rate of price inflation has become harder to forecast and to the extent that it has what changes in the inflation process have made it so the main finding is that the univariate inflation process is well described by an unobserved component trend cycle model with stochastic volatility or equivalently an integrated moving average process with time varying parameters this model explains a variety of recent univariate inflation forecasting puzzles and begins to explain some multivariate inflation forecasting puzzles as well

evaluating the impact of agricultural extension on farms performance in crete a nonneutral stochastic frontier approach this article attempts to integrate the production and the efficiency based approaches for evaluating the impact of extension on farms performance for this purpose the nonneutral production frontier model is used and the empirical analysis refers to a sample of farms from crete greece the empirical results support the proposed formulation instead of either the production or the efficiency based formulations as extension was found to have a statistically significant effect on closing both the technology and management gaps public and private extension services were found to be competitive in the production function and complementary in the technical inefficiency effect function in addition farms using both public and private extension services achieved a higher degree of technical efficiency than those using either public or private extension services and farms with no extension services were found to be the least efficient

was the deflation during the great depression anticipated evidence from the commodity futures market futures prices were well above spot prices for most commodities during most of the great depression evidently the spectacular declines in agricultural prices caught many people by surprise based on the historical correlations between commodity prices and consumer prices commodity markets anticipated stable consumer prices during the first year of the great depression the dramatic drop in nominal treasury bill yields thus should be read as a drop in ex ante real rates later in the great depression markets anticipated deflation but not as severe as actually occurred copyright 1992 by american economic association

detrending and turning points this paper examines the sensitivity of turning points classification to different detrending methods and the ability of each method to replicate nber dating we use two different turning point rules and a variety of detrending methods to compute the cyclical component of output we show that while differences are minor with the first rule the results are extremely sensitive to detrending with the second rule many detrending procedures generate false alarms and many miss several commonly classified turning points the output series detrended with the hodrick and prescott filter and with a frequency domain masking of the low frequency components of the series reproduce all nber turning points with at most two quarters lead or lag regardless of the dating rule used

the non democratic origins of income taxation this article examines the adoption of income taxes in western economies since the 19th century we identify two empirical regularities that challenge predictions of existing models of taxation and

estimation of technical inefficiency in panel data models with firm and time specific effects abstract this paper uses a panel data model and develops methods to estimate production function parameters and technical inefficiency the model distinguishes technical inefficiency from firm and time specific effects determinants of technical inefficiency is introduced by allowing its mean to be a function of exogenous variables both random and fixed effects treatment of firm and time specific effects are considered in estimation

state capacity and long run economic performance we present new evidence about the long run relationship between state capacity the fiscal and administrative power of states and economic performance our database is novel and spans 11 european countries and 4 centuries from the old regime to world war i we argue that national governments undertook two political transformations over this period fiscal centralization and limited government we find a significant direct relationship between fiscal centralization and economic growth furthermore we find that an increase in the state s capacity to extract greater tax revenues was one mechanism through which both political transformations improved economic performance our analysis shows systematic evidence that state capacity is an important determinant of long run economic growth

a new approach to decomposition of economic time series into permanent and transitory components with particular attention to measurement of the business cycle abstract this paper introduces a general procedure for decomposition of non stationary time series into a permanent and transitory component allowing both components to be stochastic the permanent component is shown to be a random walk with drift and the transitory or cyclical component is a stationary process with mean zero the decomposition methodology which depends only on past data and therefore is computable in real time is applied to the problem of measuring and dating business cycles in the portwar u s economy we find that measured expansions and contractions are of roughly equivalent duration and that our dating of cyclical episodes tends to lead the traditional nber dating and to a lesser extent the growth cycle chronology of zarnowitz and boschan 1977

bank lending and property prices in hong kong abstract this paper studies the relationship between residential property prices and bank lending in hong kong this is an interesting topic for three reasons first swings in property prices have been extremely large and frequent in hong kong second under the currency board regime monetary policy cannot be used to guard against asset price swings third despite the collapse in property prices since 1998 the banking sector remains sound while the contemporaneous correlation between lending and property prices is large our results suggest that the direction of influence goes from property prices to bank credit rather than conversely

the impact of monetary policy on stock market bubbles and trading behavior evidence from the lab we investigate the effect of monetary policy on stock market bubbles and trading behavior in experimental asset markets we introduce the possibility of investing in interest bearing bonds to the widely used laboratory asset market design of smith et al 1988 treatment groups face a variable interest rate policy which depends on asset prices while control groups are subjected to a constant interest rate we observe a strong impact of our interest rate policy on liquidity in the stock market but only a small impact on bubbles however we find that announcing the possibility of reserve requirements significantly reduces bubbles

the origins of state capacity property rights taxation and politics economists generally assume that the state has sufficient institutional capacity to support markets and levy taxes this paper develops a framework where policy choices in market regulation and taxation are constrained by past investments in legal and fiscal capacity it studies the economic and political determinants of such investments demonstrating that legal and fiscal capacity are typically complements the results show that among other things common interest public goods such as fighting external wars as well as political stability and inclusive political institutions are conducive to building state capacity some correlations in cross country data are consistent with the theory

estimating state contingent production frontiers chambers and quiggin 2000 use state contingent representations of risky production technologies to establish important theoretical results concerning producer behavior under uncertainty unfortunately perceived problems in the estimation of state contingent models have limited the usefulness of the approach in policy formulation we show that fixed and random effects state contingent production frontiers can be conveniently estimated in a finite mixtures framework an empirical example is provided compared to conventional estimation approaches we find that estimating production frontiers in a state contingent framework produces significantly different estimates of elasticities firm technical efficiencies and other quantities of economic interest

the dynamic effects of aggregate demand and supply disturbances we interpret fluctuations in gnp and unemployment as due to two types of disturbances disturbances that have a permanent effect on output and disturbances that do not we interpret the first as supply disturbances the second as demand disturbances demand disturbances have a hump shaped mirror image effect on output and unemployment the effect of supply disturbances on output increases steadily over time peaking after two years and reaching a plateau after five years

poor but allocatively efficient evidence from the eastern amazon this research empirically investigates the well known poor but efficient hypothesis formulated by schultz 1964 assuming that small scale farmers in developing countries are reasonably efficient in allocating their scarce resources by responding positively to price incentives deviating from schultz it is assumed here that scale effects explain a considerable proportion of small scale farmers relative efficiency the theoretical underpinnings of the scale efficiency concept are briefly reviewed before a normalized generalized leontief gl profit function is modeled by using its output supply and input demand system to capture the joint production of cassava flour and maize by a sample of small scale farmers in the bragantina region of the eastern amazon brazil the discussion of theoretical consistency and functional flexibility is considered by imposing convexity on the gl profit framework the empirical results confirm our revised hypothesis that small farmers in traditional development settings are poor but allocatively efficient by clearly suggesting considerable inefficiency with respect to the scale of operations

farmer participation in supermarket channels production technology and efficiency the case of vegetables in kenya supermarkets are gaining ground in agrifood systems of many developing countries while recent research has analyzed income effects in the small farm sector impacts on productivity and efficiency have hardly been studied we use a meta frontier approach and combine this with propensity score matching to estimate treatment effects among vegetable farmers in kenya participation in supermarket channels increases farm productivity in terms of meta technology ratios by 45 we also find positive and significant impacts on technical efficiency and scale efficiency supermarket expansion therefore presents opportunities for agricultural growth in the small farm sector which is crucial for poverty reduction in africa copyright 2012 oxford university press

systematic departures from the frontier a framework for the analysis of firm inefficiency departures from a production or cost frontier may reflect the systematic effect of conditions that contribute to inefficiency to test whether some portion of frontier function departures can be systematically explained the frontier inefficiency error component is modeled as a function of various causal factors and a random component the functional form of the inefficiency error term model is chosen to assure strict one sidedness preliminary empirical results generated from electric utility data suggest the superiority of including both systematic and random components in the inefficiency error term

elite competition and state capacity development theory and evidence from post revolutionary mexico international wars and interstate rivalry have been at the center of our understanding of the origin and expansion of state capacity this article describes an alternative path to the development of state capacity rooted in domestic political conflict under conditions of intra elite conflict political rulers seize upon the temporary weakness of their rivals expropriate their assets and consolidate authority because this political consolidation increases rulers chances of surviving an economic elite s challenge it enhances their incentives to develop state capacity these ideas are evaluated in post revolutionary mexico where commodity price shocks induced by the great depression affected the local economic elite differentially negative shocks lead to increased asset expropriation and substantially higher investments in state capacity which persist to the present

predicting u s recessions financial variables as leading indicators this paper examines the out of sample performance of various financial variables as predictors of u s recessions series such as interest rates and spreads stock prices and monetary aggregates are evaluated individually and in comparison with other financial and nonfinancial indicators the analysis focuses on out of sample performance from one to eight quarters ahead results show that stock prices are useful with one to three quarter horizons as are some well known macroeconomic indicators beyond one quarter however the slope of the yield curve emerges as the clear individual choice and typically performs better by itself out of sample than in conjunction with other variables

the welfare effects of crop biodiversity as an adaptation to climate shocks in kenya abstract this paper investigates the effects of crop biodiversity on farm income and production risk using a large panel dataset of rural households in kenya we consider three different metrics of in situ on farm crop diversification richness evenness and concentration we apply a partial moments based model to test the effects of each strategy on welfare defined as expected crop income variability variance and downside risk skewness our comprehensive econometric approach differentiates climatic shocks weather and climate change the results suggest that the benefits from greater diversification in terms of enhanced land productivity and lower production costs could surpass the foregone benefit from greater efficiency associated with more concentrated production systems crop richness and evenness each reduce exposure to crop income risk especially for more vulnerable farmers who produce below the expected revenue threshold farmers who rely on greater crop specialization on the contrary are more exposed to crop income risk

allocative and scale efficiency among maize farmers in zambia a zero efficiency stochastic frontier approach the commonly used stochastic frontier model assumes that all firms are inefficient in this specification inefficiency is non negative and the probability of inefficiency being exactly zero is al

costs and benefits of land fragmentation evidence from rwanda this paper disentangles different aspects of land fragmentation and its impact on the efficiency of resource use the paper uses information on the incidence of crop shocks to assess whether fragmentation provides benefits in reducing risk and parcel coordinates and terrain adjusted travel times between parcels to more precisely account for the associated costs in 2010 11 data from rwanda while fragmentation increases the time required to move between a household s parcels this does not appear to affect overall technical efficiency on the farm fragmentation rather reduces the incidence of crop shocks and increases yields and productive efficiency in rwanda s setting interventions to reduce fragmentation may therefore be ineffective or counterproductive

what does a financial shock do first international evidence in this paper we attempt to evaluate the quantitative impact of financial shocks on key indicators of real activity and financial conditions we focus on financial shocks as they have received wide attention in the recent literature and in the policy debate after the global financial crisis we estimate a panel var for 21 advanced economies based on quarterly data between 1985 and 2011 where financial shocks are identified through sign restrictions we find robust evidence that financial shocks can be separately identified from other shock types and that they exert a significant influence on key macroeconomic variables such as gdp and particularly investment but it is unclear whether these shocks are demand or supply shocks from the standpoint of their macroeconomic impact the financial development and structure of a given country is found not to matter much for the intensity of the propagation of financial shocks moreover we generally find that these shocks play a role not only in crisis times but also in normal conditions finally we discuss the implications of our findings for monetary policy fabio fornari and livio stracca

detrending stylized facts and the business cycle the stylized facts of macroeconomic time series can be presented by fitting structural time series models within this framework we analyse the consequences of the widely used detrending technique popularised by hodrick and prescott 1980 it is shown that mechanical detrending based on the hodrick prescott filter can lead investigators to report spurious cyclical behaviour and this point is illustrated with empirical examples structural time series models also allow investigators to deal explicitly with seasonal and irregular movements that may distort estimated cyclical components finally the structural framework provides a basis for exposing the limitations of arima methodology and models based on a deterministic trend with a single break

does detrending matter for the determination of the reference cycle and the selection of turning points we examine the sensitivity of turning points classification to detrending and compare the implied cycles to those derived by nber or doc researchers two dating rules are considered turning point dates are broadly insensitive to detrending with one dating rule but not the other and many procedures generate false alarms and miss several common turning points with the latter one amplitude and duration properties are also sensitive detrending and dating rules the hodrick and prescott and a frequency domain filters are best in mimicing nber and doc cycles regardless of the dating rule used

should central banks respond to movements in asset prices in recent decades asset booms and busts have been important factors in macroeconomic fluctuations in both industrial and developing countries in light of this experience how if at all should central bankers respond to asset price volatility we have addressed this issue in previous work bernanke and gertler 1999 the context of our earlier study was the relatively new but increasingly popular monetary policy framework known as inflation targeting see e g bernanke and frederic mishkin 1997 in an inflation targeting framework publicly announced medium term inflation targets provide a nominal anchor for monetary policy while allowing the central bank some flexibility to help stabilize the real economy in the short run the inflation targeting approach gives a specific answer to the question of how central bankers should respond to asset prices changes in asset prices should affect monetary policy only to the extent that they affect the central bank s forecast of inflation to a first approximation once the predictive content of asset prices for inflation has been accounted for there should be no additional response of monetary policy to assetprice fluctuations in use now for about a decade inflationtargeting has generally performed well in practice however so far this approach has not often been stress tested by large swings in asset prices our earlier research employed simulations of a small calibrated macroeconomic model to examine how an inflation targeting policy defined as one in which the central bank s instrument interest rate responds primarily to changes in expected inflation might fare in the face of a boom and bust cycle in asset prices we found that an aggressive inflationtargeting policy rule in our simulations one in which the coefficient relating the instrument interest rate to expected inflation is 2 0 substantially stabilizes both output and inflation in scenarios in which a bubble in stock prices develops and then collapses as well as in scenarios in which technology shocks drive stock prices intuitively inflation targeting central banks automatically accommodate productivity gains that lift stock prices while offsetting purely speculative increases or decreases in stock values whose primary effects are through aggregate demand conditional on a strong policy response to expected inflation we found little if any additional gains from allowing an independent response of central bank policy to the level of asset prices in our view there are good reasons outside of our formal model to worry about attempts by central banks to influence asset prices including the fact that as history has shown the effects of such attempts on market psychology are dangerously unpredictable hence we concluded that inflationtargeting central banks need not respond to asset prices except insofar as they affect the inflation forecast in the spirit of recent work on robust control the exercises in our earlier paper analyzed the performance of policy rules in worst case discussants robert shiller yale university glenn rudebusch federal reserve bank of san francisco kenneth rogoff harvard university

persistence of power elites and institutions we construct a model to study the implications of changes in political insti tutions for economic institutions a change in political institutions alters the distribution of de jure political power but creates incentives for investments in de facto political power to partially or even fully offset change in de jure power the model can imply a pattern of captured democracy whereby a democratic regime may survive but choose economic institutions favoring an elite the model provides conditions under which economic or policy outcomes will be invariant to changes in political institutions and economic institutions them selves will persist over time jel d02 d72 the domination of an organized minority over the unor ganized majority is inevitable the power of any minority is irresistible as against each single individual in the majority who stands alone before the totality of the organized minor ity at the same time the minority is organized for the very reason that it is a minority

monetary policy and financial imbalances facts and fiction following the financial crisis many have argued that monetary policy should lean against asset price increases and that deviations of credit and asset prices from trend can be used to capture financial imbalances we study quarterly data spanning 1986 2008 for a sample of 18 countries and argue that such measures contain little information useful for forecasting the future economic conditions this casts doubts on the leaning against the wind view we also argue that tightening monetary policy in response to such imbalances are likely to depress real growth substantially that finding however is sensitive to the lucas critique katrin assenmacher wesche and stefan gerlach

political violence and farm household efficiency in colombia abstract this article estimates farm household levels of technical efficiency and their determinants in colombia with particular reference to political violence i e guerrilla fronts homicides kidnappings and forced population displacements an input oriented stochastic frontier is estimated simultaneously with a technical inefficiency model that incorporates an index of political violence at the local level using survey data from 822 farm households the findings show that household productivity is lower in areas with high political violence due mainly to disruptions in rural labor markets and in the operation of large farms should political violence be eliminated the ensuing increases in the farrell s technical efficiency indexes of farm households in the sample would increase substantially pointing to significant peace dividends for rural households in colombia

democracy war and wealth lessons from two centuries of inheritance taxation in this article we use an original data set to provide the first empirical analysis of the political economy of inherited wealth taxation that covers a significant number of countries and a long time frame 1816 2000 our goal is to understand why if inheritance taxes are often very old taxes the implementation of inheritance tax rates significant enough to affect wealth inequality is a much more recent phenomenon we hypothesize alternatively that significant taxation of inherited wealth depended on 1 the extension of the suffrage and 2 political conditions created by mass mobilization for war using a difference in differences framework for identification we find little evidence for the suffrage hypothesis but very strong evidence for the mass mobilization hypothesis our study has implications for understanding the evolution of wealth inequality and the political conditions under which countries are likely to implement policies that significantly redistribute wealth and income

on crop biodiversity risk exposure and food security in the highlands of ethiopia this paper investigates the effects of crop genetic diversity on farm productivity and production risk in the highlands of ethiopia using a moment based approach the analysis uses a stochastic production function capturing mean variance and skewness effects welfare implications of diversity are evaluated using a certainty equivalent measured as expected income minus a risk premium reflecting the cost of risk we find that the effect of diversity on skewness dominates its effect on variance meaning that diversity reduces the cost of risk the analysis also shows that the beneficial effects of diversity

decent rural employment and farm production efficiency empirical evidence from tanzania and ethiopia promoting decent rural employment by creating new jobs in rural areas and upgrading the existing ones could be one of the most efficient pathways to reduce rural poverty this article systematically investigates the impact of decent rural employment on agricultural production efficiency in ethiopia and tanzania the analysis applies an output oriented distance function approach with an estimation procedure that accounts for different technological demographic socioeconomic institutional and decent rural employment indicators data of the 2011 round of living standards measurement study integrated surveys on agriculture for the two countries are used and a set of indicators is derived to proxy core dimensions of decent rural employment the findings of our analysis show that decent rural employment contributes to agricultural production efficiency

a generalized production frontier approach for estimating determinants of inefficiency in u s dairy farms this article investigates farm level efficiency of u s dairy farmers by estimating their technical and allocative efficiency technical inefficiency is assumed to be composed of a deterministic component that is a function of some farm specific characteristics and a random component by doing this we extend the stochastic frontier methodology in which determinants of technicial inefficiency are explicitly introduced in the model given the inputs variations in efficiency of farms are then explained by both deterministic and random components of technical inefficiency the empirical results indicate that a levels of education of the farmer are important factors determining technical inefficiency and b large farms are more efficient technically than small and medium sized farms both technical and allocative inefficiency are found to decrease with increase in the level of education of the farmer

smallholder technical efficiency controlling for environmental production conditions abstract smallholder agricultural production depends heavily on environmental production conditions that are largely exogenously determined yet few data sets collect necessary detailed information on environmental production conditions this oversight raises the spectre of likely omitted variables bias because farmers input choices typically respond in part to environmental conditions moreover because environmental production conditions are rarely symmetrically distributed the omission also generally leads to upward bias in estimated technical inefficiency and to biased estimates of the correlates of estimated technical inefficiency as well using panel data from 464 traditional rice plots in cote d ivoire we show that controlling for heterogeneous environmental production conditions significantly changes inferences perhaps especially with respect to smallholder rice farmers estimated technical inefficiency

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

does heterogeneity in goals and preferences affect efficiency a case study of farm households in northern nigeria household characteristics are commonly used to explain variation in smallholder efficiency levels the underlying assumption is that differences in intended behavior are well described by such variables while there is no a priori reason that this is the case moreover heterogeneity in farmer goals and preferences in relation to the role of the farm enterprise are not well documented in developing countries this article makes a contribution to fill this gap by empirically determining heterogeneity in farmer goals and attitudes in nigeria through a pair wise ranking supplemented with likert scales factor analysis is used to reduce these data into behavioral factors we estimate technical and allocative efficiency levels and analyze how these are related to farm characteristics and the identified behavioral factors the models in which both intended behavior and farmer characteristics are included give a significantly better fit over models in which only household characteristics are included these regression results suggest that the socioeconomic environment affects efficiency levels both directly and indirectly through changes in goals and attitudes

monetary policy and the global housing bubble what caused the housing boom of the 2000s a number of researchers have suggested that loose monetary policy during the first half of the 2000s was a primary cause of the substantial run up in house prices in many countries however using a common statistical approach we find that monetary policy was not the main factor that should not be surprising although low interest rates raise house prices the increase in prices during the mid 2000s was much larger than the historical relationship between the two variables would suggest instead we investigate further the link between the marked loosening in terms and standards for mortgage credit and the most rapid increases in house prices this link provides some evidence for a story where credit provision and the demand for housing fed on each other and helped spur the housing boom our work suggests a greater role for macroprudential regulation rather than monetary policy in managing asset price booms jane dokko brian m doyle michael t kiley jinill kim shane sherlund jae sim and skander van den heuvel

frontier production functions and technical efficiency a survey of empirical applications in agricultural economics abstract the modelling and estimation of frontier production functions has been an important area of econometric research during the last two decades forsund lovell and schmidt 1980 and schmidt 1986 present reviews of the concepts and models involved and cite some of the empirical applications which had appeared to their respective times of publication this paper seeks to update the econometric modelling of frontier production functions associated with the estimation of technical efficiency of individual firms a survey of empirical applications in agricultural economics is an important part of the paper

relative efficiency of women as farm managers profit function analysis in cote d ivoire abstract the efficiency of women farmers in the agricultural sector of developing countries is passionately debated very few studies have examined this issue in african agriculture all previous studies were based on production functions but have been criticised as suffering from simultaneous equation bias because the input levels are endogenous the profit function method avoids these problems no previous study has used the profit function method to test for technical allocative and economic efficiency differences between women and men farmers the objective of this paper was to determine whether women rice farmers are less efficient than men rice farmers in cote d ivoire using the restricted normalised profit function method our results show that the relative degree of efficiency of women is similar to that of men the paper provides empirical support for efforts to eliminate bias against women farmers in african agriculture

shadow wages allocative inefficiency and labor supply in smallholder agriculture this article introduces a method for estimating structural labor supply models in the presence of unobservable wages and deviations of households marginal revenue product of self employed labor from their shadow wage this method is therefore robust to a wide range of assumptions about labor allocation decisions in the presence of uncertainty market frictions locational preferences etc we illustrate the method using data from rice producers in cote d ivoire these data like previous studies reveal significant systematic differences between shadow wages and the marginal revenue product of family farm labor we demonstrate how one can exploit systematic deviations in the present case related to household characteristics such as the land labor endowment ratio to control for both unobservable wages and prospective allocative inefficiency in labor allocation in structural household labor supply estimation

sequential signals of recession and recovery this paper describes a sequential procedure for identifying the beginning and ending dates of business cycle recessions as promptly and accurately as practicable its origin lies in a study in progress for the economic development administration eda u s department of commerce which deals with the problem of designing and testing an efficient trigger formula for public works expenditures with the aid of a system of cyclical indicators however the proposed approach can be applied much more broadly to any temporary countercyclical policy program on the national level federal policy programs of job creation through public works or public service employment have been repeatedly called countercyclical without in fact being so most such programs came into effect much too late to counter the cyclical early and confirming signals of business cycle peaks and troughs are produced sequentially on a current basis by a system of monitoring smoothed rates of change in the composite indexes of leading and coincident indicators evidence is offered that the system would have identified each of the peaks and troughs of u s business cycles since 1949 without undue delays and false alarms countercyclical policies activated and deactivated by such signals would have desirable timing properties

personality traits technology adoption and technical efficiency evidence from smallholder rice farms in ghana although a large literature highlights the impact of personality traits on key labor market outcomes evidence of their impact on agricultural production decisions remains limited data from 1 200 ghanaian rice farmers suggest that noncognitive skills polychronicity work centrality and optimism significantly affect simple adoption decisions returns from adoption and technical efficiency in rice production and that the size of the estimated impacts exceeds that of traditional human capital measures greater focus on personality traits relative to cognitive skills may help accelerate innovation diffusion in the short term and help farmers to respond flexibly to new opportunities and risks in the longer term

leading economic indicators new approaches and forecasting records preface 1 editors introduction part i new concepts and methods 2 toward a theory of leading indicators frank de leeuw 3 a time series framework for the study of leading indicators salih n neftci 4 a probability model of the coincident economic indicators james h stock and mark w watson 5 an international application of neftci s probability approach for signalling growth recessions and recoveries using turning point indicators michael p niemira 6 on predicting the stage of the business cycle roy h webb 7 bayesian methods for forecasting turning points in economic time series sensitivity of forecasts to asymmetry of loss structures arnold zellner and chansik hong 8 new developments in leading economic indicators geoffrey h moore part ii forecasting records and methods of evaluation 9 forecasting cyclical turning points the record in the past three recessions stephen k mcnees 10 turning point predictions errors and forecasting procedures hermon o stekler 11 forecasting peaks and troughs in the business cycle on the choice and use of appropriate leading indicator series stephen j silver 12 using a consensus of leading economic indicators to find right ball park for real gnp forecasts edward f renshaw 13 some australian experience with leading economic indicators allan p layton 14 turning point prediction with the composite leading index an exante analysis francis x diebold and glenn d rudebusch 15 forecasting recessions under the gramm rudman hollings law victor zarnowitz and geoffrey h moore 16 leading indicators of inflation howard l roth part iii new economic indicators 17 commodity prices as a leading indicator of inflation james m boughton and william h branson 18 a leading indicator of inflation based on interest rates susmita dasgupta and kajal lahiri 19 using composite leading indicators of consumption to forecast sales and to signal turning points in stock market michael p niemira 20 economic indicators for australia s service sector ernst a boehm 21 purchasing management survey data their value as leading indicator philip a klein and geoffrey h moore 22 an agenda for inventories input to leading composite index feliks tamm index

improving the speed of adoption of agricultural technologies and farm performance through farmer groups evidence from the great lakes region of africa the article examines the effect of membership in farmer groups mfg on adoption lag of agricultural technologies and farm performance in burundi the democratic republic of congo and rwanda we use duration and stochastic production frontier models on farm household data we find that the longer the duration of mfg the shorter the adoption lag and much more so if combined with extension service delivery farmer groups function as an important mechanism for improving farm productivity through reduced technical inefficiency in input use we discuss policy implications under which farmer groups are a useful channel to reduce adoption lag and the means through which improved farm performance can be achieved

the measurement and sources of technical inefficiency in the indonesian weaving industry production function models are estimated with a time series of cross section data on indonesian weaving establishments the sources of technical inefficiency are investigated three firm attributes are identified as being potentially related to firm efhciency tbey are firm ownership age and size the importance of these attributes as sources of inefficiency in the indonesian weaving industry is investigated and the implications of the find ings discussed

the adoption and impact of soil and water conservation technology an endogenous switching regression application this paper identifies the factors that affect farmers decisions to adopt soil and water conservation technology in africa and how this technology impacts farm yields and net returns this technology is important because it improves efficiency of water use from rainfall a critical issue in water deficient sub saharan africa an analysis of new data from a survey of 342 rice farmers in northern ghana shows that farmers education capital and labor constraints social networks and extension contacts and farm soil conditions mainly determine adoption of field ridging and the adoption of this technology increases rice yields and net returns significantly jel q15 q24

farm size relative efficiency and agrarian policy in cote d ivoire profit function analysis of rice farms abstract this paper examines the relative economic efficiency of small and large rice farms in cote d ivoire using a profit function approach no differences in the relative economic efficiency of small and large farms were found this conclusion is robust under alternative model specifications agrarian reforms directed towards further concentration of landholding for large farms in cote d ivoire cannot be justified based on economic efficiency results show that access to credit and use of modern rice varieties significantly increase profits to improve technical efficiency of rice farms an accelerated program to provide information credit improved seeds and other inputs is needed when all the farms i e large and small are taken together there is evidence of allocative inefficiency strategies are needed to remove such management related inefficiencies in rice production either through the development of a better market price information system or effective farmer oriented technical training programs by rice extension workers

labor productivity and employment gaps in sub saharan africa drawing on a new set of nationally representative internationally comparable household surveys this paper provides an overview of key features of structural transformation labor allocation and labor productivity in four african economies new micro based measures of sector labor allocation and cross sector productivity differentials describe the incentives households face when allocating their labor these measures are similar to national accounts based measures that are typically used to characterize structural changes in african economies however because agricultural workers supply far fewer hours of labor per year than do workers in other sectors productivity gaps disappear almost entirely when expressed on a per hour basis what look like large productivity gaps in national accounts data could really be employment gaps calling into question the prospective gains that laborers can achieve through structural transformation these employment gaps along with the strong linkages observed between rural non farm activities and primary agricultural production highlight agriculture s continued relevance to structural change in sub saharan africa

livestock in china commodity specific total factor productivity decomposition using new panel data studies of total factor productivity tfp in livestock production are rare but when available provide useful information especially in the context of developing countries such as china where livestock is becoming more important in the domestic agricultural economy we estimate tfp for four major livestock products in china employing the stochastic frontier approach and decompose productivity growth into its technical efficiency te and technical progress components efforts are made to adjust and augment the available livestock statistics the results show that growth in tfp and its components varied between the 1980s and the 1990s as well as over production structures while there is evidence of considerable technical innovation in china s livestock sector te improvement has been relatively slow

off farm work technical efficiency and rice production risk in taiwan this article investigates the differences in yield production production efficiency and yield risk for farmers both with and without off farm work using a nationwide survey of rice farmers in taiwan we estimate two stochastic production frontier models that accommodate technical inefficiency and production risk simultaneously for farmers both with and without off farm work the stochastic dominance criterion is then applied to compare the differences in the distributions of the estimated technical efficiency and yield risk between groups the empirical results indicate that these two groups of farmers use resources in different ways and off farm work is not necessarily associated with lower technical efficiency for farmers in the lower percentiles of the efficiency distribution those with off farm work are more efficient than their counterparts without off farm work in addition farmers with off farm work face higher production risk and this result is robust for the entire distribution