diversification and livelihood sustainability in a semi arid environment a case study from southern ethiopia abstract this paper examines the recently growing adoption of non pastoral livelihood strategies among the borana pastoralists in southern ethiopia a large portion of the current non pastoral participation is in petty and natural resource based activities pastoral and crop production functions are estimated using the cobb douglas model to analyse the economic rationale behind the growing pastoralist shift to cultivation and other non pastoral activities the low marginal return to labour in traditional pastoralism suggests the existence of surplus labour that can gainfully be transferred to non pastoral activities an examination of the pastoralist activity choices reveals that the younger households with literacy and more exposure to the exchange system display a more diversified income portfolio preference the findings underscore the importance of human capital investment and related support services for improving the pastoralist capacity to manage risk through welfare enhancing diversified income po

china s electrification and rural labor analysis with fuzzy regression discontinuity abstract this article exploits the exogenous shock of china s rural primary electrification program at the county level to understand how electrification may impact rural arears in terms of labor supply the fuzzy regression discontinuity method is employed to address the endogeneity problem of the electrification assignment and to identify treatment effects the results show that the assignment of the electrification treatment can be efficiently identified by whether the amount of pretreatment electricity consumption level fell below a cutoff value moreover over the program s disbursement period from 1991 to 2000 electrification has had measurable and positive impact on labor supply and electricity consumption of the rural households there is also evidence that electrification has negative effect on the long term employment growth in the rural areas of the recipient counties the article concludes the positive effect of electrification on labor supply is hard to translate into a positive effect on rural employment in the absence of rural enterprises development

can peers improve agricultural revenue crop revenues vary greatly among farmers and the source of that variation is not fully understood even after controlling for factors including input use technology adoption and other agro climatic factors one hypothesis that may explain the variation in outcomes among farmers is differential access to information through peers using a household survey from india containing detailed information about personal relationships we estimate peer effects on cash crop revenue using a novel spatial econometric technique to control for reflection our results show that 60 of farmers revenue is explained by peers peer effects are particularly large in pesticide use and in the cultivation of a new crop however peer effects in input expenditures and land allocation cannot fully explain the variation in revenue implying peers may also associate with management negotiation and marketing we find that peer effects are significant among farmers self reported peers especially among those peers who are farmers main advisors for agricultural matters although caste based networks both within the same and in adjacent villages are important their effect is smaller than that of self reported peer networks we empirically rule out that our effects are driven by other factors such as geographically correlated unobservables farmers following a lead farmer or economies of scale our findings speak to both the potential and the limitations of peers as sources of agricultural information and highlight the need for future research about how to best integrate peers into agricultural extension

estimating labor supply of farm households under nonseparability empirical evidence from nepal abstract this paper examines the labor supply of farm households in nepal using a recently developed methodology that accounts for the simultaneity between production and consumption decisions of the households estimates of marginal products of male and female labor or shadow wages are obtained from an agricultural production function an instrumental variable approach is then used to recover the household s structural labor supply from variations in the shadow wages and income as well as other household characteristics the findings reveal that both male and female total labor supply are sensitive to changes in shadow wages and income human capital embodied in education is found to exert a significant positive effect on output but has no statistically significant impact on total labor supply of individuals the results also rejects the existence of efficient labor markets in rural nepal

labor market opportunities and intrafamily time allocation in rural households in south asia this paper utilizes a time allocation survey of a four year panel of households from six villages in semi arid tropic rural india estimates of the inter relationships between adult male female and child market wage rates and time allocated to the market domestic production leisure and schooling by boys and girls are presented the role of individual unobservable heterogeneity and self selection into activity participation is also accounted for the overall results suggest the importance of the opportunity cost of time in intrafamily time use

the returns from schooling in a diversified rural economy controlling for the endogeneity of activity choice and considering both household head and family schooling we findevid ence of high returns from schooling in both crop andnoncrop activities as schooling levels increase the returns from schooling shift away from crop production failure to control for activity selection andfamily schooling is likely to result in biasedestimates of the returns from schooling in individual activities copyright 2000 oxford university press

caste female labor supply and the gender wage gap in india boserup revisited abstractthe gender wage gap is notable not just for its persistence and ubiquity but also for its variation across regions and countries a natural question is how greater workforce participation by women matters to female wages and the gender wage gap within india a seeming paradox is that gender differentials in agricultural wages are the largest in southern regions of india that are otherwise favorable to women ester boserup hypothesized that this is due to greater labor force participation by women in these regions this is not obvious as greater female labor supply could depress male wages as well other factors also need to be accounted for especially since women have fewer opportunities for nonfarm employment this article undertakes a formal test of the boserup proposition we find that differences in female labor supply are able to explain 55 of the gender wage gap between northern and southern states of india the article also finds that women gain from greater nonfarm employment even if

the optimality of s s policies for a stochastic inventory problem with proportional and lump sum penalty cost in this paper we consider a single product multi period inventory problem for which the penalty cost consists of two parts a lump sum portion which is independent of the size of the shortage and a portion which is linear in the size of the shortage we show that for all nonincreasing demand density functions the expected total cost function is k convex and hence there is an optimal policy for the n period problem that is s s

the optimality of myopic stocking policies for systems with decreasing purchasing prices abstract this paper studies the stocking replenishment decisions for inventory systems where the purchasing price of an item decreases overtime in a periodic review setting with stochastic demands we model the purchasing prices of successive periods as a stochastic and decreasing sequence to minimize the expected total discounted costs purchasing inventory holding and shortage penalty for systems with backlogging and lost sales we derive conditions regarding the cost parameters under which myopic stocking policies are optimal

gender differentials in farm productivity implications for household efficiency and agricultural policy abstract within many african households agricultural production is simultaneously carried out on many plots controlled by different members of the household detailed plot level agronomic data from burkina faso provides striking evidence of substantial inefficiencies in the allocation of factors of production across the plots controlled by different members of the household production function estimates imply that the value of household output could be increased by 10 15 by reallocating currently used factors of production across plots this finding contradicts standard models of agricultural households a richer model of behaviour which recognizes that the individuals who comprise a household compete as well as co operate has important implications for the structure of agricultural production and for the design of agricultural policy

male female differences in agricultural productivity methodological issues and empirical evidence abstract most estimates of male female differences in technical efficiency from production function studies show that male and female farmers are equally efficient farm managers controlling for levels of inputs and human capital there is some evidence however of allocative inefficiency within households marginal products of labor depend on the relative scarcities of labor and the gender division of labor in specific farming systems many of these studies however are methodologically flawed greater attention needs to be given to appropriate estimation methods endogenous input choice the use of headship as a stratifying variable and the implications of intrahousehold resource allocation

wives time allocation and intrahousehold power evidence from the philippines utilizing a rich survey data collected in the southern part of the philippines this paper examines the time allocation of wives within the collective household framework by investigating not only the role of socioeconomic factors but also the influence of various intrahousehold power indicators analysis of autonomy and finality of intrahousehold decisions discloses that decisions are not unilaterally decided by a single household member a result which confirms the prediction of collective household framework adopting a simple test procedure this paper also examines which of the competing household models collective or unitary best describes these philippine time use data testing results lend support to the validity of the collective household framework

optimal myopic policy for a stochastic inventory problem with fixed and proportional backorder costs in this paper we consider a single product periodic review stochastic demand inventory problem where backorders are allowed and penalized via fixed and proportional backorder costs simultaneously fixed backorder cost associates a one shot penalty with stockout situations whereas proportional backorder cost corresponds to a penalty for each demanded but yet waiting to be satisfied item we discuss the optimality of a myopic base stock policy for the infinite horizon case critical number of the infinite horizon myopic policy i e the base stock level is denoted by s if the initial inventory is below s then the optimal policy is myopic in general i e regardless of the values of model parameters and demand density otherwise the sufficient condition for a myopic optimum requires some restrictions on demand density or parameter values however this sufficient condition is not very restrictive in the sense that it holds immediately for erlang demand density family we also show that the value of s can be computed easily for the case of erlang demand this special case is important since most real life demand densities with coefficient of variation not exceeding unity can well be represented by an erlang density thus the myopic policy may be considered as an approximate solution if the exact policy is intractable finally we comment on a generalization of this study for the case of phase type demands and identify some related research problems which utilize the results presented here

the determinants of nonfarm activities and incomes of rural households in mexico with emphasis on education abstract this paper presents the main results of a study of the effects of education as well as other household assets on the choice of activities and incomes of rural mexican households our study examines the various income sources as well as the education of the household s head and its members implications are drawn for rural education and development policies to promote rural nonfarm incomes and employment

the investment opportunity set and accounting procedure choice abstract this paper provides evidence on the cross sectional relation between firms investment opportunities their debt and compensation contracts their size and financial leverage and their accounting procedure choices this evidence is important because previous studies hypothesize that the link between firms investment opportunities and their accounting choices helps explain extant results on the size debt equity and bonus plan hypotheses however while i find that firms investment opportunities do affect the nature of their contracts i also find that the traditional explanations for accounting choice are important after controlling for the effects of the investment opportunity set

productive inefficiency in extended agricultural households evidence from mali abstract in sub saharan african farm households two types of plot management often coexist collective fields are farmed jointly by household members under the authority of the head while individual plots are autonomously managed by members in this paper we explore the productivity differentials between collective and individual plots in the context of extended family farms we find that land yields are significantly larger on male private plots than on common plots after all appropriate controls have been included yet the disadvantage of common plots exists only for care intensive crops and for cash crops we provide evidence that the yield differentials stem from labor incentive problems they may arise from the prevailing reward function and or from preference heterogeneity over the use of the proceeds from the collective field

an efficient nonmarket institution under imperfect markets labor sharing for tropical forest clearing this article examines the substitutability efficiency and evolution of an important nonmarket institution in agrarian societies labor sharing from analyses of field level data on forest clearing through time among shifting cultivators in the peruvian amazon we find 1 no productivity difference and unitary elasticities of substitution among family hired and cooperative labor i e perfect substitutes 2 the combination of labor market and sharing makes total labor use unconstrained by household and network endowments i e efficient labor allocation and 3 as labor composition is constrained by network endowments and liquidity credit policies alter not only labor composition but also network formation

nutrition labour productivity and labour supply of men and women in ghana ghana s population is expected to increase from 14 1 million in 1990 to 18 7 million in 2000 bumb et al 1994 this growth in population along with growth in per capita income and urbanisation will create increased demand for food before the launching of the economic reform programme in 1983 ghana s food production had fallen to an abysmally low level in response to the general deterioration in the economy output of food and cash crops declined at a rate of 0 3 percent per year between 1970 and 1980 cereal production which exceeded domestic demand by some 200 000 tonnes in 1971 73 registered a deficit of over 300 000 tonnes in 1981 83 production of starchy staples fell from 7 9 million tonnes to 4 1 million tonnes between 1974 and 1981 as a result of declining food output combined with a rising population per capita food availability in 1981 83 was 30 percent lower than it was in 1975 efforts made under the economic recovery programme have improved the food supply situation in the country although food production levels still remain low output levels of cocoyam and plantain have not reached their average levels in the early 1970 s table 9 1

joint determination of food consumption and production in rural sierra leone estimates of a household firm model abstract this paper investigates the determination of food consumption for rural households in sierra leone that produce the foods which they consume a household firm model is estimated with seven commodities including five foods non foods and labor as compared to three commodities in past studies such food disaggregation permits tracing of the effects of socioeconomic variables on household nutrient availability household specialization in production is such that censored data is a problem a tobit approach is used to correct for this for most crops the own price effects on consumption remain negative when a price change is allowed to shift the budget constraint by effecting the profits from home production elasticities of calorie availability with respect to toal expenditure are found to be sizeable varying little by expenditure group the price elasticities of calorie availability are generally positive however an important exception occurs for price of the staple food rice this exception has several important policy implications which are explored

empirical research on accounting choice abstract we review research from the 1990s that examines the determinants and consequences of accounting choice structuring our analysis around the three types of market imperfections that influence managers choices agency costs information asymmetries and externalities affecting non contracting parties we conclude that research in the 1990s made limited progress in expanding our understanding of accounting choice because of limitations in research design and a focus on replication rather than extension of current knowledge we discuss opportunities for future research recommending the exploration of the economic implications of accounting choice by addressing the three different reasons why accounting matters

inefficiency of male and female labor supply in agricultural households evidence from uganda this article analyzes the efficiency of the intra household allocation of female and male labor inputs in agricultural production in a collective household model spouses optimal on farm labor supply is such that the marginal rate of technical substitution between male and female labor is equated over different crops using the uganda national household survey 2005 06 we test whether this condition holds by estimating production functions and controlling for endogeneity using a method proposed by gandhi navarro and rivers 2009 we find that women are less productive than men that there is more female labor input on low productivity parcels and that men are relatively more productive on female controlled plots compared with male controlled plots total farm output could be higher and pareto improvements could be possible if male labor was reallocated to female controlled plots and or female labor was reallocated to male controlled plots

equilibrium returns policies in the presence of supplier competition the pioneering pasternack returns policy model analyzed channel coordination with a single supplier catering to a retailer facing stochastic demand for a perishable product with a fixed price and the model showed that giving partial returns of unsold stock to the retailer is the optimal policy for the entire supply chain the result thus begs the question as to why manufacturers of perishable commodities widely accept full returns of unsold stock as the norm we model the environment as one where two capacity constrained manufacturers compete for shelf space with the same retailer and we show that a complete credit returns policy is in fact the only possible equilibrium of the game our results obviate the need for knowing the exact functional form of the demand distribution in order to compute the returns credit as pasternack s results would require from a retailer s standpoint we establish a simple procurement strategy and show that it is optimal the same game with price only contracting has a pure strategy equilibrium when the supplier capacities are below a threshold value and a mixed strategy equilibrium when the supplier capacities cross this threshold but are still so limited that no single supplier can with certainty supply all the quantity demanded

market wages family composition and the time allocation of children in agricultural households this article draws upon a time allocation survey of a four year panel of households from six villages in semi arid tropic rural india the inter relationships among adult male female and child market wage rates and time allocated to domestic activities leisure and schooling by boys and girls are analysed the results based on the pooled time series and cross section individual observations suggest that adult and child wage rates play an important role in the time allocation of both boys and girls

yield and allocation management in a continuous make to stock system with demand upgrade substitution abstract yield management is crucial for high tech industries to reduce over production however it is very challenging for a manufacturer to make a yield decision under the circumstance of uncertain demand and stochastic product quality for example in semiconductor manufacturing industry products are produced in batches within certain production cycle time even if the same raw material is put into the production system the product qualities measured by performance usually are not identical due to random yield in the manufacturing process since products have overlapped performance specifications products of the same batch are classified into different classes according to their qualities at the allocation stage products with higher performance can substitute for demand for products with lower performance this type of production and allocation system can be specified as a make to stock system with single material multi products multi periods upward demand substitution under random yield and uncertain demands in order to maximize profit the manufacturer needs to decide on the optimal input material quantity and the optimal allocation policy the problem is formulated as a stochastic dynamic programming model because manufacturer s profit is affected by the allocation policies atp r allocation policy is proposed to help manufacturer make real time allocation decisions a numerical experiment shows that atp r allocation policy performs better than the traditional myopic allocation policy to reduce the computation burden involved in atp r allocation policy we further propose a simplified algorithm and our experimental studies provide proof of the effectiveness of the proposed simple algorithm

aggregation of test statistics abstract in the preceding paper christie provides three tests to facilitate formal inferences in survey papers that examine related empirical studies those tests reinforce the view that accounting technique choice is related to variables that may proxy for contracting and monitoring costs in the market and political processes however the contribution of the tests is limited because the fundamental question of the relation between the empirical regularities and the theory remains unexamined

taxes and firm size abstract firm size has been used as a proxy for the firm s political costs and hence managers proclivity to choose income reducing accounting procedures this study provides additional evidence on this topic by examining the association between firm size and effective corporate tax rates the latter are one component of a firm s political costs the roughly fifty largest u s exchange listed firms in particular oil and gas companies and manufacturing firms have significantly higher worldwide tax rates than other firms these higher tax rates are observed primarily after the implementation of the u s 1969 tax reform act and after the opec countries raised their tax rates on u s oil producers the findings which are insensitive to alternative sources of data alternative measures of firm size and alternative measures of effective tax rates are consistent with the use in previous studies of firm size as a proxy for the firm s political costs

shadow wages and peasant family labour supply an econometric application to the peruvian sierra a striking feature of developing economies is the large proportion of the work force that is self employed lack of widespread labor market participation in the agricultural sector can pose a major obstacle to the empirical implementation of economic models of the peasant household whether because wage data are simply not available or because the assumptions required to make use of wage data stretch the bounds of credulity this paper develops a methodology for estimating a structural labor supply model for primarily self employed peasant households which holds under a general agricultural technology and set of labor market conditions the unique feature of the approach is that the opportunity cost of time or shadow wage of household workers is explicitly estimated from an agricultural production function and is subsequently used to identify a set of structural labor supply parameters recent household survey data from rural peru is employed to estimate and perform various diagnostic tests on the model the empirical findings lend support to the hypothesis that peasant households allocate their members time as if to maximize a family utility function and moreover demonstrate the tractability of the shadow wage methodology and its usefulness in estimating more elaborate time allocation models

stopped myopic policies in some inventory models with generalized demand processes this paper considers single item inventory systems with immediate delivery and no economies of scale bounds are provided on the value loss relative to optimal cost for restricting attention to the class of inventory stocking policies that behave myopically up to a specified stopping time the stopping time may be random and may depend on demand histories as well as information exogenous to the firm the bounds are robust to the nature of the demand process faced after the stopping time so are applicable when the statistics of demand after the stopping time are unknown stopping times that are large with high probability imply that near term decisions are completely specified with high probability the general bounding results allow one to consider demand processes that may otherwise be analytically intractable it is shown that the class of demand models for which the assumption of additive i i d shocks is appropriate is the same class admitting effective myopic stocking policies the bounds also make rigorous the intuitive notion that myopic policies are least effective in systems with precipitous drops in demand coupled with an inability to recover cash invested in inventory the option of selling inventory at discount is a reality in many real systems and enhances the attractiveness of the myopic stocking policy in numerical examples the myopic policy is shown to be an effective competitor in a range of systems for which optimal policies are not known the results suggest that for systems with immediate delivery no economies of scale and no currently known optimal policy the myopic stocking rule is a reasonable default policy to adopt

myopic solutions of markov decision processes and stochastic games sufficient conditions are presented for a markov decision process to have a myopic optimum and for a stochastic game to possess a myopic equilibrium point an optimum or an equilibrium point is said to be myopic if it can be deduced from an optimum or an equilibrium point of a static optimization problem or a static nash game the principal conditions are a each single period reward is the sum of terms due to the current state and action b each transition probability depends on the action taken but not on the state from which the transition occurs and c an appropriate static optimum or equilibrium point is ad infinitum repeatable these conditions are satisfied by several dynamic oligopoly models and numerous markov decision processes

productivity of men and women and the sexual division of labor in peasant agriculture of the peruvian sierra abstract this paper estimates the productivity of men and women in the peasant agriculture of the peruvian sierra using recent household survey data a sexual division of labor on the farm implies that male and female labor are not perfectly substitutable evidence is found for female specialization on livestock production a translog production function reveals that the use of animal traction and land affect the marginal productivity of male and female labor differently suggesting that the two types of labor cannot be aggregated overall adult male labor is found to contribute more to farm output at the margin than adult female labor though the extent of the difference is sensitive to how farm output and the labor inputs are measured

inventory control with generalized expediting we consider a single item periodic review inventory control problem in which discrete stochastic demand must be satisfied when shortages occur the unmet demand must be filled by some form of expediting we allow a very general form for the cost structure of expediting we explicitly consider the case where expedited production is allowed to produce up to a positive inventory level we also consider the case where expedited production beyond the deficit is not permitted an alternate application for this model is an inventory system with general lost sales costs for the infinite horizon discounted problem we characterize the structure of the optimal stationary expediting policy and show that an s s policy is optimal for regular production for the special cases where the expediting cost function is concave or consists of a fixed and linear per unit cost we show that the optimal stationary expediting policy is generalized s s or order up to respectively a numerical study allows us to gain insight into when expediting above and beyond the deficit is cost effective

the division of labor by sex in agriculture a peruvian case study explores the relationship between womens participation in familial agricultural labor and the process of agrarian class formation among a group of andean peasants in the province of cajamarca peru the study area is characterized by a large independent sector of peasants most of whom have insufficient land to produce their subsistence requirements causing them to participate in local and regional labor markets several reasons why census data underestimate peasant womens participation in agricultural production are advanced survey data from the study area show that a minimum of 21 of the total number of agricultural labor days employed on peasant agricultural units were contributed by women the data show that there is a significant difference in the agricultural division of labor by sex in different strata of the peasantry with women from near landless and smallholder households participating more and in more different tasks than women from middle and rich peasant families the upper strata of the peasantry conform to boserups observation that participation of women in the familial agricultural labor force is less where a sizable rural proletariat exists