estimating a price surface for vacant land in an urban area tthis paper examines urban land prices within a non parametric framework with specific interest in the land price gradient with respect to distance from the city center the land price surface is estimated over a 900 square mile portion of the chicago metropolitan area and is based on transaction level data of vacant land parcels the price surface is estimated using piecewise parabolic multiple regression proposed by colwell 1998 given the flexibility of this approach a rather complex price surface is revealed the estimated price surface provides some support for the standard urban economic doctrine of falling land prices with distance

does tax increment financing raise urban industrial property values the paper examines the impact of tax increment financing tif on the value of industrial properties in chicago because tif designation may be self selected a two stage procedure is used to estimate the influence of tif the authors find that the value of industrial parcels located in mixed use tif districts i e those that also contain commercial or residential properties is higher than that of similar parcels that are not located in a tif district however the value of industrial parcels that are located in homogeneous industrial use tif districts is no higher and in some specifications is lower than that of similar parcels not located in a tif district these divergent results may be best explained by industrial parcel owners desire to convert their properties to non industrial uses

remittances and the informal economy abstract many developing countries are characterized by a large informal sector and are also often heavily dependent on remittance inflows from abroad we develop a general equilibrium framework to understand better the dynamic absorption of remittances in a two sector small open economy by incorporating many of the stylized features of the informal sector calibrating the model to yield a long run equilibrium consistent with sample averages for 56 developing countries for the period 1990 2014 we show that the effect of remittances depends critically on how they impinge on the recipient economy i e whether these inflows are i permanent or temporary ii associated with a collateral effect to securitize borrowing and iii exogenous or countercyclical we also identify the conditions under which remittances are associated with an expansion of the informal sector as well as the dutch disease effect

measuring interactions among urbanization land use regulations and public finance this article presents a polychotomous choice selectivity model to estimate the interactions among urbanization land use regulations and public finance in five western states california idaho nevada oregon and washington land use regulations in these five states reduced the total developed area by an estimated 12 2 from 1982 to 1992 but increased housing prices between 1 3 and 4 7 depending on the intensity of land use regulations in a county land use regulations also reduced public expenditure and property tax in the long run by 5 6 and 8 4 respectively but increased public expenditure and property tax in the short run by 9 8 and 12 6 local land use policies have been examined in a number of studies e g epple romer and filmore henderson levine mcdonald and mcmillen phillips and goodstein however little empirical evidence is available on which factors motivate adoption of land use regulations nor has there been much systematic analysis of the impact of land use regulations on land development and public finance in this article we present an empirical model to evaluate quantitatively the interactions among urbanization land use regulations and public finance in five western states of the united states oregon california idaho nevada and washington we provide estimates of both the extent to which the rate of development affects the demand for more restrictive land use regulations as well as the subsequent impact of those regulations on land development housing prices public expenditure and property tax because local political processes determine land use regulations treating regulations as exogenous may cause a selection bias when analyzing their effect on development pogodzinski and sass the endogenous nature of zoning regulation was first raised by

internalizing neighborhood externalities the effect of subdivision size and zoning on residential lot prices abstract though land development regulations potentially control neighborhood externalities the developer of a residential subdivision contributes to that control by developing a larger parcel of land this paper reports estimates of the effect of parcel size on the sale price of developed building lots the results indicate that adding an acre to the median development increases lot prices by about 3 amenities appear to be income normal and the return to parcel size is greater in unincorporated areas perhaps due to less intensive governmental control over externalities

the impact of climate change on incomes and convergence in africa abstract climate change is projected to detrimentally affect african countries economic development while income inequalities across economies is among the highest on the planet however it is projected that income levels would converge on the continent hitherto there is limited evidence on how climate change could affect projected income convergence accelerating slowing down or even reversing this process here we analyze convergence considering climate change damages by employing an economic model embedding the three dimensions of risks at the country level exposure vulnerability and hazards the results show 1 with historical mean climate induced losses between 10 and 15 percent of gdp per capita growth the majority of african economies are poorly adapted to their current climatic conditions 2 western and eastern african countries are projected to be the most affected countries on the continent and 3 as a consequence of these heightened impacts on a number of countries inequalities between countries are projected to widen in the high warming scenario compared to inequalities in the low and without warming scenarios to mitigate the impacts of economic development and inequalities across countries we stress 1 the importance of mitigation ambition and africa s leadership in keeping global mean temperature increase below 1 5 c 2 the need to address the current adaptation deficit as soon as possible 3 the necessity to integrate quantitatively climate risks in economic and development planning and finally 4 we advocate for the generalization of a special treatment for the most vulnerable countries to access climate related finance the analysis raises issues on the ability of african countries to reach their sdgs targets and the potential increasing risk of instability migration across african countries of decreased trade and economic cooperation opportunities as a consequence of climate change exacerbating its negative consequences

exploring spatial dynamics with land price indexes the purpose of this study is to explore the within region spatial dynamics of appreciation and depreciation rates using three different representations of geographical space mean value indexing methods are used to construct global land price indexes sub market land price indexes and local land price indexes using transaction price data for vacant residential land within the city of hamilton ontario between 1995 and 2003 the results are validated against statistics canada s series of new housing price indexes followed by a comparison of the relative performance of the three geographical representations of land price indexes the results indicate that the mean value indexing methods are robust although subject to outliers and sample selection bias and clearly illustrate the spatial dynamics of annual appreciation and depreciation rates across the study area the results also underscore the need for regular surveillance of the spatial dynamics of urban land markets

measuring the costs of children an alternative approach abstract the cost of a child or the general equivalence scale as it is more commonly known is a concept of considerable importance in matters relating to public policy and welfare it has played a crucial part in numerous theoretical and empirical studies relating to poverty income distribution dietary needs income maintenance programs supplementary and child benefits and other forms of social security payments in a welfare state and in assessing the horizontal equity of income taxation in spite of a long tradition of estimating the scale from observed household budget data there remain severe problems in estimation and interpretation of the scales this paper proposes a new methodology for calculating the scale using a framework which is consistent with utility theory and which overcomes the identification problem without having to enforce the arbitrary prior assumptions of recent studies the proposed method allows easy calculation of not only the basic scale parameter but also how it varies with price and reference utility we illustrate the usefulness of the procedure by estimating on u k budget data at two different levels of aggregation and employing two sets of quite different functional forms the results are plausible compare favourably with one another and hence confirm the robustness and usefulness of the proposed procedure

the influence of household composition on household expenditure patterns theory and spanish evidence a concept of demographic separability is proposed that formalizes the notion that there are groups of goods adult goods that have little or no relationship to specific classes of household demographics the numbers or ages of children that there exist adult goods demographically separable from children is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the validity of rothbarth s method for measuring child costs we propose two different methods for testing demographic separability and present results from a 1981 survey of spain the econometric evidence is in fair agreement with the theoretical presuppositions

on measuring child costs with applications to poor countries the theoretical basis for measuring child costs is discussed and detailed consideration is given to two straightforward procedures for calculation engel s food share method and rothbarth s adult good method each of these methods embodies different definitions of child costs so that the same empirical evidence can generate quite different estimates depending on the method used it is shown that true costs are generally overstated by engel s method and understated by rothbarth s procedure although the latter unlike the former can provide a sensible starting point for cost measurement our estimates from sri lankan and indonesian data suggest that children cost their parents about 30 40 percent of what they spend on themselves

household equivalence scales and interpersonal comparisons recent papers have used household equivalence scales to construct measures of welfare inequality this procedure rests on an often implicit value judgement namely that if after adjustment for demographic characteristics two households are on the same indifference curve they are equally well off that value judgement is not compelling and there are situations in which it is ethically repugnant this is particularly likely if tastes are functions of past experience and income

do remittances facilitate a sustainable current account we examine how workers remittances impact on the current account in doing so we focus on how remittances affect the sustainability rather than the size of current account balances we find that the presence of remittances makes it more likely that exports and imports are cointegrated thereby lending support to current account sustainability furthermore quantile regression analysis suggests that increased remittances are associated with a faster speed of current account adjustment towards long run equilibrium particularly for those countries characterised by already highly persistent current account balances in contrast to a literature that emphasises an adverse dutch disease impact of workers remittances on the real exchange rate in terms of reduced external competitiveness our findings suggest that remittances are actually beneficial to the current account balance

poverty and household size the widely held view that larger families tend to be poorer in developing countries has influenced research and policy the scope for size economies in consumption cautions against this view we find that the correlation between poverty and size vanishes in pakistan when the size elasticity of the cost of living is about 0 6 this turns out to be the elasticity implied by a modified version of the food share method of setting scales by contrast some measures of child nutritional status indicate an elasticity of unity consideration of the weight attached to child versus adult welfare may help resolve the non robustness of demographic profiles of poverty excerpt

remittances finance and growth does financial development foster the impact of remittances on economic growth abstract there is no consensus in the literature regarding the long run impact of remittances on economic growth previous studies have shown that it might be related to financial development in the transfer receiving country but the direction of the link remained unclear i contribute to this literature by using a newly created index of overall financial development and two different estimation methods i measure the importance of remittances given financial development for economic growth in developing countries as there is no widely accepted measure of financial sector development i estimate an index of overall financial conditions it is created by means of an unobserved components model and used to determine the relevance of the financial sector as a transmission channel for remittances to affect economic growth i show that the more financially developed a country is the smaller the impact of remittances on economic growth remittances can foster growth but the effect is significant only at low levels of financial development this is in line with previous studies which found remittances and financial development to be substitutes however the interaction between the two factors becomes weaker once size depth and efficiency of the financial sector are taken into account my results suggest that while attracting migrants transfers can have important short run poverty alleviating advantages in the long run it might be more beneficial for governments to foster financial sector development

site density restrictions measurement and empirical analysis abstract restrictions on the density at which development can occur are a central tool of land use regulation yet they are understudied in the empirical literature in this paper we present a methodology to identify how much restrictions on the ratio of building space to lot area constrain developers our approach generates a measure of the distortion from the private optimum caused by restrictions as a function of land prices and the maximum allowed ratio of floor space to lot area we use this methodology to examine how the set of incentives facing different levels of local government in shanghai china affects density constraints on redevelopment sites in the city s emerging real estate market

the market effects of zoning undeveloped land does zoning follow the market through restricting the uses of land zoning gives local governments the power to modify the dictates of unconstrained land markets many believe however that the regulations tend to coincide with or anticipate the market solution rather than modify it the validity of this assertion is an empirical question and has not yet been adequately addressed the purpose of this paper is to develop and apply an empirical test of the null hypothesis that zoning follows the market the null hypothesis can be rejected only if land uses under zoning differ from what they would be without zoning the first task in deriving the test is to differentiate between constrained and unconstrained land market allocations it is shown that parameter estimates for hedonic price functions when markets are zoned cannot be interpreted to imply that the regulations constrain market prices it is also shown that sample selection bias is a likely source of specification error in estimating hedonic price functions for zoned land markets since the sample selection of parcels to zone designations is unlikely to be random the selection process must be accounted for in ordinary least squares ols estimation of zone constrained hedonic price functions fortunately the correction for the specification error also provides a test for the market effects of zoning a bid price interpretation of hedonic price functions for land is presented in section ii the sample selection bias issues are also discussed in that section and a formal test for the market effects of zoning is introduced

motivations to remit evidence from botswana in this article a theory of motivations to send remittances is described and tested with data from botswana altruism is one of the motivations tested and found to be an insufficient explanation for remittances among migrants in botswana a refinement of the model stipulates a modified altruism or enlightened self interest in this model the relationship between the migrant and family is tempered by an implicit understanding of mutual benefit the household strategy may be to encourage some members to migrate as a means of spreading risk and sharing gains the household strategy is similar to an insurance policy where migration is to places where market potential is high the risks incurred might be high the example is given of migration during a drought in botswana migrant remittances were greater in households with more cattle or households with more to lose drought alone was not statistically related to remittances increases in remittances were related to increased levels of education it is suggested that repayment was the motive for parents investment in migrants education migrants gains are identified as the potential for an inheritance the security of channeling investments through a trusted family member and security in having a home to return to it is pointed out that the altruism and family remittances from urban migration were strategies that bridged the simple dynamic of either urban development or rural development impacting on family welfare it is suggested that household models of economy adopt some measure to express the relationship of household wealth to remittances from urban migrants

the design of direct taxation and family benefits abstract the subject of this paper is the design of the personal income tax and social security benefits that vary with the size of the family it is concerned with the analytical problems of policy design that arise from constraints on the instruments which may be used from differences in social judgements about the desirability of redistribution and from differences of view about the disincentive effects of taxation the paper considers these issues in the context of the french tax benefit system and the implications of the french system being harmonised towards certain features of the british system

revealed community equivalence scales abstract this paper estimates the equivalence scale revealed by discretionary community allocations of welfare benefits to poor households i apply the proposed approach to a subsidized rice program in indonesia in which villages designated program beneficiaries and estimate the equivalence scale implicit in the beneficiaries they selected i find that the revealed community equivalence scale for this program lies much closer to per capita expenditure than traditional demand based equivalence scales particularly in the poorest communities this suggests that per capita expenditure may be closer to how poor communities actually compare households when allocating aid than previously thought

a study of the impacts of zoning on housing values over time abstract using a virtually unique data base for vancouver canada this study examines the ways in which various zoning classifications and land uses affect the sale prices of single family residences over a 24 year period the overwhelming conclusion is that while there are impacts they are consistent in neither direction nor magnitude the results suggest that the negative externalities that are generally assumed to exist may in fact not exist as a result the use of zoning to control the effects of such presumed externalities may not be justified

analysis of urban land shortages the case of korean cities both natural constraints and government regulations on urban land use can cause urban land shortages and hence higher prices of urban land and housing than otherwise there have been attempts to investigate the differential effects of natural and contrived restrictions on land price for w x example rose 10 found that natural constraints have a significant positive impact on land value while monopoly zoning power makes a smaller contribution in explaining inter city variations in urban land price w x on the other hand pollakowski and wachter 8 analyzed the impact of land use controls measured by an index of restrictiveness of zoning and confirmed that land use regulations raise the prices of housing and developed land to the best knowledge of the authors however none of the published empirical studies including the two cited above actually measure the amount of shortage of urban land at the city level instead land supply variables are employed together with demand variables such as income and population size to determine their impact on land or housing prices this study seeks to fill the gap in the literature first by developing a measure of the urban land shortagersurplus from an analysis of land price

has poverty gotten worse iven the major changes now being implemented in programs aimed atalleviating poverty in the united states it is important to have a goodunderstanding of how the extent of poverty has evolved over the lastcouple of decades has poverty gotten worse or have we been gradually winningthe war on poverty there is unanimous agreement that there was a steady and dramatic decreasein the percentage of the u s population in poverty during the 1960s the of cialu s census bureau gures show the poverty rate dropping from 22 4 percent ofthe population in 1959 to 12 6 percent in 1970 with a further decrease to11 1 percent in 1973 the trend since 1973 is not as clear the of cial poverty raterose somewhat during the latter part of the 1970s and then sharply increased dur ing the recession of the early 1980s reaching 15 2 percent in 1983 it then graduallydeclined hitting 12 8 percent in 1989 increased to 15 1 percent in 1993 and thendropped to 13 8 percent in 1995 according to the of cial rate even at the peakof the economic expansion of the late 1980s there was a higher percentage of thepopulation with income below the poverty line than there was 20 years earlier poverty does seem to have gotten worse this conclusion is controversial however because the way in which poverty isbest measured is controversial the of cial poverty scale has been criticized alonga number of dimensions one point of contention is whether people should bede ned as being poor when they are part of a family with

the identification of urban employment subcenters abstract the purpose of this paper is to propose empirical criteria for the identification of urban employment subcenters it is suggested that gross employment density employment divided by total land area and the employment population ratio are the best measures to identify an urban zone as an employment subcenter these measures are used to identify employment subcenters in the chicago smsa in 1970 and previous studies of housing and land prices in chicago are reviewed

life cycle expenditure allocations and the consumption costs of children abstract in this paper we assess whether it is changing needs or intertemporal substitution that dominate household expenditure responses to the presence of children over the life cycle we construct lifetime expenditure paths for households with different demographic profiles and consider the shape of these paths and some possible implications for welfare measures simulated expenditure paths based on consistent single period and multi period models indicate that it is indeed changing needs that dominate such paths in periods when children are present in the household however allowing for intertemporal substitution is still shown to be important since it can introduce new information relevant to the calculation of household welfare

how serious is the neglect of intrahousehold inequality in this report the authors develop a framework for assessing the consequences of ignoring intrahousehold inequality in the measurement and analysis of poverty and inequality they apply this framework to data for the philippines and conclude that 1 the result of neglecting intrahousehold inequality will probably be considerable understatement of the levels of poverty and inequality with the philippine data measured levels of inequality and poverty were off 30 percent as a result of ignoring intrahousehold variation and 2 patterns of inequality revealed by household level data are somewhat different from patterns revealed by individual level data but the differences seem not to be dramatic to confirm these results the exercise should be repeated with data from other countries

consumption technology and the intrafamily distribution of resources adult equivalence scales reexamined adult equivalence scales are supposed to measure differences in the needs of households of different demographic composition formally they purport to measure the change in the cost of attaining a certain welfare level when the family composition varies this paper shows that the definition and the measurement of these scales depend crucially on the concept of welfare used when welfare is the utility parents derive from their own consumption one has to assume separability of parents and children s consumption this assumption implies that the only way of imputing the intrafamily allocation of resources is by observing the consumption patterns of adult goods regardless of the definition used one cannot separate the factors reflecting home technology i e needs from those determining the intrafamily distribution rule i e wants out of consumption data

the effects of international migration on migrant source households evidence from ethiopian diversity visa lottery migrants about a million people have migrated to the us via the diversity visa dv lottery the dv was instituted by an act of the united states congress to diversify the u s population through a lottery made available to people from countries with historically low rates of immigration to the country in any given year the probability of winning the lottery is less than 1 with millions of people from around the world competing for a maximum of 55 000 immigrant visas that can be obtained through this migration channel using ethiopian dv participants which have consistently made up between 6 and 8 of all dv immigrants i study the causal effects of emigration on the well being of the migrant sending families i infer that migration contributes positively to the welfare of the source families overall migration increases consumer expenditure but has no effect on savings and business ownership of the senders the positive treatment effects do not diminish with duration of emigration migrant men contribute more to the increase in their families standard of living than their female counterparts do while expenditure on food and energy are invariant to the migrants gender the gains in terms of durable ownership access to clean water and sanitation facilities occur almost entirely in families where the emigrants are men i find that dv participants are favorably selected relative to the overall population

factors affecting commercial land values an empirical study of milwaukee wisconsint this paper uses an implicit market approach to model the highest and best use concept when applied to single family residential development formulated from the landowner s perspective this persistence forecasting model relies on the theory that the

selection bias and land development in the monocentric city model the land development process implied by the monocentric city model is extremely simple the model as set forth by muth 13 and mills 12 contains no error terms and the city lies on a featureless plain land is converted to urban use whenever urban land values rise relative to agricutural land values the assumptions of the model assure that land development in any period takes place in a ring at the edge of the city in this paper we relax the assumption that the city is a featureless plain by introducing error terms to the urban and non urban land value functions this simple addition a necessity for empirical work produces a much richer land development process than is imbedded in the simple muth mills model the error terms in the land value functions which represent the effects of missing variables such as the fertility of the soil influence the selection of land for urban and non urban use this selection process in turn causes a bias in ols estimates of land value functions the form of the selection bias implies three possible land development patterns first if traits that produce high urban land values cause low non urban values relatively low value non urban land is developed first and has above average value in urban use however if unusually productive agricultural land is also highly valued in urban use then the development process depends on the relative magnitudes of the variances of the two land value distributions for example if the variance of the urban distribution is the larger then relatively high value non urban land is developed first and has above average land value in urban use the greater variance in the urban distribution implies that unusually good farmland can earn more in urban use thus the expanded muth mills model incorporates urban expansion at the expense of high quality agriculture and a more benign land market in which only comparatively low quality agricultural land is taken by cities the expanded muth mills model implies the existence of selection bias in land value equations selection bias has only recently been recognized

household equivalence scales and welfare comparisons abstract the ratio of cost functions of different households facing the same prices and attaining the same utility level is a true cost of demographic characteristics index this index is independent of a base level of income or utility ib if and only if it equals a ratio of household equivalence scales that are themselves ib applied cost index and equivalence scales specifications are usually ib this paper describes the general restrictions on cost functions and social welfare functions required for ib scales and for their use in welfare analysis

remittances institutions and economic growth summary there is considerable debate regarding the relative contribution of international migrants remittances to sustainable economic development while officially recorded remittances to developing countries have increased over the last decade research has not come to a consensus over whether remittances have a positive or negative impact on long run growth this paper argues that contradictory findings have emerged when looking at the remittances growth link because of an omitted variable bias specifically remittances will be more likely to contribute to longer term growth in countries with higher quality political and economic policies and institutions

health and consumption preferences estimating the health state dependence of utility using equivalence scales abstract this paper estimates health state dependence of utility in europe for identification we introduce a new method using insights from the research domain of living standards we estimate how much extra or less income is needed to maintain the same level of material wellbeing after a health shock and we derive a simple relation between this estimate and the health state dependence parameter the results show positive health state dependence this is not driven by medical expenditures and is robust across alternative specifications and health measures interestingly for cognitive limitations we find negative health state dependence presumably resulting from a decreased ability to plan

are remittances an effective mechanism for development evidence from tajikistan 1999 2007 abstract in many remittance receiving countries evidence linking remittances to household economic stability and investment is limited using three cross sectional national surveys 1999 2003 2007 we compare remittance receiving to non remittance households in tajikistan a country highly dependent on remittances exploring household perceptions of financial security wealth and entrepreneurial activity across a period of rising remittance reliance we find that households receiving remittances are not more economically stabile wealthier or entrepreneurial than non remittance households findings highlight the importance of conceptualising remittances as a process influenced by the developmental contexts within receiving countries and question previous assumptions concerning development pathways

on the causal nexus of remittances and poverty reduction in bangladesh the aim of this article is to investigate the causal relationship between remittances and poverty reduction in bangladesh over the period 1976 to 2010 this issue is of fundamental importance for the developing economy of bangladesh we apply newly developed methods by hacker and hatemi j 2006 2012 that are based on simulations and are robust to the violation of statistical assumptions especially when the sample size is small as is the case in this article our estimation results reveal that causality nexus of poverty and remittances is bi directional we also find that the causal impact of poverty reduction on remittance is stronger than the reverse impact this finding implies that bangladeshi policy makers can influence remittances through poverty reduction in the long run

domestic technology consumption economies of scale and poverty evidence from sri lanka while it is well known that new technologies enhance consumer welfare the manner in which these technologies impact the ability to realize economies of scale in consumption is not well understood we use sri lankan household data to examine how the adoption of new technologies by households positively impacts their ability to achieve household economies of scale this suggests that new technologies not only deliver a greater variety of consumption goods to consumers but they may also play an important role in enabling large households to escape poverty by lowering the per capita costs of maintaining a given standard of living given the importance of consumption economies of scale in the measurement of poverty this study provides some insights on the extent to which the number of poor households changes when food consumption scale economies due to technology adoption in the domestic sphere are incorporated

multiple regime bid rent function estimation abstract this paper reviews estimators for multiple regime selection models which include the standard urban bid rent model as a special case 4 probabilistic bid rent model imposes a restrictive selection process while existing two stage multiple regime estimators assume an error structure that is inconsistent with bid rent theory monte carlo experiments demonstrate that two stage estimators are accurate and robust to distributional misspecification the practical usefulness of the estimators is illustrated using data on 1920s chicago land values

the determinants of nonresidential urban land values abstract this paper presents the results of an empirical study of nonresidential urban land values in the dallas metropolitan area the data base consists of 467 vacant land transactions from 1978 to 1982 by concentrating on sales prices of vacant land rather than improved property problems normally encountered from use of appraised values or improved properties are eliminated separate models are developed for industrial commercial and office land the study focuses on the tendency toward agglomeration for consumers of each land use as measured by the impact on land values in the central business district suburban nodes and other employment concentrations the results provide insight into a number of influences on urban land value and offer evidence that office land derives greater benefit from agglomeration than does commercial or industrial land

household equivalence scales theory versus policy researchers agree that household equivalence scales are intended to measure the variation in income needed to bring households of different composition to the same welfare level researchers do not agree however about how the term household welfare is to be defined this article traces the historical and philosophical development of three distinct definitions when the conceptual bases of several popular methods for the estimation of equivalence scales are explored it becomes clear that advances in theoretical rigor have not always worked to bring the literature closer to answering questions of policy concern

do remittances lead to a public moral hazard in developing countries an empirical investigation abstract this article tests the hypothesis that in a context of bad governance remittance inflows strongly reduce public spending on education and health in receiving countries a phenomenon called the public moral hazard problem using a large sample of 86 developing countries over the period 1996 2007 and after factoring in the endogeneity of remittances the results suggest a negative impact of remittances on public spending on education and health when governance is bad in remittance dependent economies

expenditure on children a rothbarth type method consistent with scale economies and parents bargaining abstract we suggest a new methodology to estimate the share of household income accruing to children the household behavior is represented according to the collective approach that is each household member is characterized by specific preferences following the principle of the rothbarth approach the identification of the children s share requires the observation of adult specific goods our method differs from this traditional approach in that it is compatible with economies of scale as well as with parents bargaining we illustrate the method with an application to the french household budget survey

the structure of urban land prices abstract recognition of the existence of nonlinear land prices has an impact on the measurement of the rate at which land price declines with distance from the urban center it is hypothesized that concave parcel prices have given rise to overly large estimates of the rate of price decline with distance because parcel sizes increase with distance and increased parcel sizes would be associated with lower unit prices as a result of the concavity of the land price function this hypothesis is empirically tested using vacant residential commercial and industrial land sales from within cook county illinois an important finding is that allowing for concavity greatly reduces although it does not eliminate measured rates of price decline with distance

intra household resource allocation an inferential approach if household income is pooled and then allocated to maximize welfare then income under the control of mothers and fathers should have the same impact on demand with survey data on family health and nutrition in brazil the equality of parental income effects is rejected unearned income in the hands of a mother has a bigger effect on her family s health than income under the control of a father for child survival probabilities the effect is almost twenty times bigger the common preference or neoclassical model of the household is rejected if unearned income is measured with error and income is pooled then the ratio of maternal to paternal income effects should be the same equality of the ratios cannot be rejected there is also evidence for gender preference mothers prefer to devote resources to improving the nutritional status of their daughters fathers to sons

a comment on zoning returns to scale and the value of undeveloped land this paper revisits the relationship between land value and parcel size the authors demonstrate that using a simple arbitrage equilibrium argument the value size relationship is convex concave whenever land assembly subdivision is possible they also explore further the impact of zoning on market outcomes copyright 1993 by mit press

household economies of scale in consumption theory and evidence household economies of scale arising from the existence of househo ld public goods increasing returns in household production and or bulk discounts are incorporated into a utility theoretic model of household demands individuals are assumed to be identical and symmetrically treated within households economies of scale parameters for five goods are estimated using the quadratic expenditu re system and data from the u s consumer expenditure survey on expenditures by all adult households results suggest the existence o f significant economies of scale in the consumption of all of the included goods with economies being especially pronounced in the consumption of shelter copyright 1988 by the econometric society

land use regulations and regional economic development this paper uses a data intensive computable general equilibrium cge model of a medium sized city with integrated commercial and residential land data to analyze changes to local land use regulations via changes in land supply elasticities on economic development measures employment household income housing prices and tax revenue under various types of regional growth that originate from different local sectors the cge framework overcomes difficulties of econometric modeling in this area namely measurement consistency impact isolation and endogeneity issues the results both link the sparse work in this area and provide a systematic analysis including marginal and total impacts

title systems and land values abstract the torrens or registration and the recording title systems apply different principles to resolve conflicting claims to land title this paper develops a theoretical model of how expected title risk and transactions costs affect land value across the two systems and ultimately concludes that the torrens system leads to higher property values ceteris paribus it also suggests that empirical studies of the title system land value nexus need to control for self selection effects in the data we use the simultaneous existence of two alternative title systems in cook county illinois as a natural experiment for comparing land values under each system the estimates indicate that the torrens system increases land value relative to the recording system when controlling for self selection effects

aggregate consumer behavior and household equivalence scales this article presents estimates of household equivalence scales broken down by demographic characteristics of u s households separate estimates are given by family size age of head region race and urban versus rural residence commodity specific scales are presented for five separate commodity groups energy food consumer goods capital services and other services the estimates are obtained from an econometric model of aggregate consumer behavior the parameters of this model are estimated by combining aggregate time series and individual cross section data

determinants of local public policies for farmland preservation and urban expansion a french illustration we outline the determinants of local public policies for farmland preservation and urban expansion we first rely on the literature and on a purposely designed field study of municipalities in southern france to propose a theoretical framework better suited to the french situation the model considers aspects of land consumption includes two interest groups as well as the median voter and is then econometrically tested we confirm the expected effects of certain sociodemographic determinants and highlight the impact of municipal budgetary considerations and the role of the agricultural sector we also find more counterintuitive determinants like local political regime or unbalanced neighboring relationships