do buyers characteristics and personal relationships affect agricultural land prices the influence of buyer and personal relationship characteristics on agricultural land prices has received little attention in the literature recently perry and robison 2001 used a restricted nonlinear specification to model the influence of personal relationships on the implicit prices of land characteristics in this paper a more flexible alternative model is proposed an approach to general model specification and model selection is presented the results indicate that buyer characteristics and personal relationships exert nonuniform effects on the implicit prices of land characteristics our results support the hypothesis that social capital affects the terms of trade in the land market

measuring the comparative advantage of agricultural activities domestic resource costs and the social cost benefit ratio the domestic resource cost drc indicator is widely used in developing countries to measure comparative advantage and guide policy reforms in this paper we demonstrate that the drc formula is biased against activities that rely heavily on domestic factors land and labor and that a simple social cost benefit scb ratio is a generally superior measure of social profitability the scb uses the same data as the drc in a formula which does not distort profitability rankings the policy significance of improved measurement is shown using data from kenya where the drc overstates the relative profitability of activities using large amounts of tradable inputs

corruption in america abstract we use a data set of federal corruption convictions in the u s to investigate the causes and consequences of corruption more educated states and to a smaller degree richer states have less corruption this relationship holds even when we use historical factors like congregationalism in 1890 as an instrument for the level of schooling today the level of corruption is also correlated with the level of income inequality and racial fractionalization and uncorrelated with the size of government there is a weak negative relationship between corruption and economic development in a state these results echo the cross country findings and support the view that the correlation between development and good political outcomes occurs because education improves political institutions

testing the causes of discontinuities in the black market exchange rate in china abstract this paper reports the results of empirical tests of the determinants of the dornbush et al model of black market exchange rates and the effects of government policy interventions on the currency black market premium in china we found that only the real official exchange rate from the dornbusch et al model was a significant determinant of the premium some government policy initiatives however were significantly related to major changes in the premium the paper examines policy implications of these findings

some models for estimating technical and scale inefficiencies in data envelopment analysis in management contexts mathematical programming is usually used to evaluate a collection of possible alternative courses of action en route to selecting one which is best in this capacity mathematical programming serves as a planning aid to management data envelopment analysis reverses this role and employs mathematical programming to obtain ex post facto evaluations of the relative efficiency of management accomplishments however they may have been planned or executed mathematical programming is thereby extended for use as a tool for control and evaluation of past accomplishments as well as a tool to aid in planning future activities the ccr ratio form introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes as part of their data envelopment analysis approach comprehends both technical and scale inefficiencies via the optimal value of the ratio form as obtained directly from the data without requiring a priori specification of weights and or explicit delineation of assumed functional forms of relations between inputs and outputs a separation into technical and scale efficiencies is accomplished by the methods developed in this paper without altering the latter conditions for use of dea directly on observational data technical inefficiencies are identified with failures to achieve best possible output levels and or usage of excessive amounts of inputs methods for identifying and correcting the magnitudes of these inefficiencies as supplied in prior work are illustrated in the present paper a new separate variable is introduced which makes it possible to determine whether operations were conducted in regions of increasing constant or decreasing returns to scale in multiple input and multiple output situations the results are discussed and related not only to classical single output economics but also to more modern versions of economics which are identified with contestable market theories

technological change rediscovering the engine of productivity growth in china s rural economy abstract this paper focuses on measuring the relative importance of the role of technology versus that of institutional innovation in china s rural economy a six equation rice sector model explaining provincial level technology adoption yield and factor demand are econometrically estimated using data from china s 13 rice growing provinces for the period 1975 1990 growth decomposition analysis identifies technology adoption as the most important determinant of rice yield growth during 1978 1984 accounting for nearly 40 percent the change institutional reform accounted for 35 percent of the growth in 1985 1990 technology accounts for all of the increase in rice yields the study demonstrates earlier studies may have over estimated the impact of decollectivization

the effect of democracy and press freedom on corruption an empirical test this paper tests the effect of democracy and press freedom on corruption the empirical investigation carried out in this paper suggests that democracy and press freedom can have significant impact on corruption

market power in a gis based hedonic price model of local farmland markets buyers of farmland are usually interested in parcels for sale that are close to their own farms with a limited number of parcels for sale this may lead to market power in local farmland markets the objective of this paper is to investigate whether market power affects farmland prices hedonic price models are adapted to allow for local market power of either sellers or buyers a distinction is made between rural and urban farmland markets the results provide evidence of market power effects in rural farmland markets however for farmland in urban areas market prices are dominated by speculation effects

the transition of corruption from poverty to honesty measures of corruption and income are highly correlated across countries we use prehistoric measures of biogeography as instruments for modern income levels we find that our instrumented incomes explain the cross country pattern of corruption just as well as do actual incomes this result demonstrates that the long run causality is entirely from income to corruption hence there is a corruption transition as countries get rich corruption vanishes

environmental efficiency analysis of power industry in china based on an entropy sbm model chinese national natural science fund 71073040 710201139 71273075 humanities and social science fund of the ministry of education 09yjc790061

the comparative politics of corruption accounting for the east asian paradox in empirical studies of corruption growth and investment abstract numerous empirical studies demonstrate that corruption reduces investment and or slows growth but how robust are these relationships this question is answered by conducting a series of crosscountry regression tests using four different corruption datasets we find that corruption slows growth and or reduces investment in most developing countries particularly small developing countries but increases growth in the large east asian newly industrializing economies the latter finding provides solid empirical support to a country case literature that explains the east asian paradox the combination of high corruption and high growth in terms of stable and mutually beneficial exchanges of government promotional privileges for bribes and kickbacks

valuing ecosystem services a shadow price for net primary production abstract we analyze the contribution of ecosystem services to gdp and use this contribution to calculate an empirical price for ecosystem services net primary production is used as a proxy for ecosystem services and along with capital and labor is used to estimate a cobb douglas production function from an international panel a positive output elasticity for net primary production probably measures both marketed and nonmarketed contributions of ecosystems services the production function is used to calculate the marginal product of net primary production which is the shadow price for ecosystem services the shadow price generally is greatest for developed nations which have larger technical scalars and use less net primary production per unit output the rate of technical substitution indicates that the quantity of capital needed to replace a unit of net primary production tends to increase with economic development and this rate of replacement may ultimately constrain economic growth

corruption and corruptibility summary the expressed norms and values of both citizens and street level officials explicitly condemn the giving or taking of bribes however citizens respond to extortion by officials and officials respond to temptation by clients this paper is based on over 6 000 interviews with the public and over 1 300 with street level officials in four postcommunist countries the czech republic slovakia bulgaria and ukraine who were questioned about i their values ii their hypothetical conditional behavior if exposed to extortion or temptation iii their personal experience of extortion or temptation and iv their actual behavior with respect to bribes

efficiency analysis of german electricity distribution utilities non parametric and parametric tests this study applies non parametric and parametric tests to assess the efficiency of electricity distribution companies in germany traditional issues in electricity sector benchmarking are addressed such as the role of scale effects and optimal utility size as well as new evidence specific to the situation in germany labour capital and peak load capacity are used as inputs and units sold and the number of customers as output the data cover 307 out of 553 german electricity distribution utilities a data envelopment analysis dea is applied with constant returns to scale crs as the main productivity analysis technique whereas stochastic frontier analysis sfa with distance function is the verification method the results suggest that returns to scale play but a minor role only very small utilities have a significant cost advantage low customer density is found to affect the efficiency score significantly in particular in the lower third of all observations surprisingly east german utiliti

influence of soil conservation on farm land values worldwide concern for the loss of agricultural soil has led many governments to establish programs to slow the loss of soil from farms mcconnell 1983 has shown however that in the absence of externalities farmer decisions on investment to reduce onfarm soil loss can be socially optimal and concludes p 188 as follows increasing soil loss does not imply that farmers ignore physical production relations if farmers know that the soil base affects farm resale value they will conserve it it suggests that the impact of soil depth on the value of farms be investigated earlier rausser 1980 reached a similar conclusion suggesting that land values which fail to reflect soil quality encourage the farmer to ignore his long run impact on the resource two recent studies failed to find clear cut relationships between soil erosion and farm land prices ervin and mill 1985 942 in a cross section study of farm land prices in page county iowa concluded the group of variables measuring past and future erosion damages and conservation structures did not exhibit large and reliable effects gardner and barrows 1985 studied the capitalization of the value of soil conservation practices into farm land prices in southwestern wisconsin and concluded p 946 the most reasonable conclusion is the most obvious conservation

the effect of democracy on corruption income is key summary this paper provides an explanation for the ambiguous relationship between democracy and corruption using rich panel data with annual observations from 1998 to 2012 allows us to control not only for country and time invariant factors but also for potential reverse causality between corruption and income levels in a 3sls framework democracy reduces corruption but only in economies that have already crossed a gdp capita level of approximately us 2 000 in 2005 us for poorer nations democratization is suggested to increase corruption other institutional characteristics are unlikely to drive this result and findings are robust to a variety of robustness checks and quantile regressions

the pre programme earnings dip and the determinants of participation in a social programme implications for simple programme evaluation strategies the key to estimating the impact of a programme is constructing the counterfactual outcome representing what would have happened in its absence this problem becomes more complicated when agents such as individuals firms or local governments self select into the programme rather than being exogenously assigned to it this paper uses data from a major social experiment to identify what would have happened to the earnings of self selected participants in a job training programme had they not participated in it we investigate the implications of these earnings patterns for the validity of widely used before after and difference in differences estimators

corruption and fast change summary the article elucidates conceptual issues that arise for the study of corruption when several coexisting contradictory norms for allocating different modes of transactions across society exist one important reason for their coexistence is fast change of the institutional rules that allocates transactions across transactional modes two cases are explored and studied 1 transition from a family based to a modern normative grid and 2 transition from a socialist to a market based economy corruption is regarded as illegitimate intrusions of market or family modes of transaction into political or bureaucratic fields

climate change and australia s comparative advantage in broadacre agriculture australia has long been a major exporter of the products of broadacre agriculture a production system well suited to the economic and climatic conditions of the country presumably it holds a comparative advantage in these products among which grain crops and grazing livestock predominate however the future plausibility of this proposition is sensitive to the projected impacts of climate change this article develops a framework to quantify the future patterns of comparative advantage in broadacre agriculture given the projections of several global climate models we find empirical support for the conventional wisdom and note substantial resilience and robustness in australia s comparative advantage under a number of scenarios

political decentralization and corruption evidence from around the world abstract how does political decentralization affect the frequency and costliness of bribe extraction by corrupt officials previous empirical studies using subjective indexes of perceived corruption and mostly fiscal indicators of decentralization have suggested conflicting conclusions in search of more precise findings we combine and explore two new data sources an original cross national data set on particular types of decentralization and the results of a firm level survey conducted in 80 countries about firms concrete experiences with bribery in countries with a larger number of government or administrative tiers and given local revenues a larger number of local public employees reported bribery was more frequent when local or central governments received a larger share of gdp in revenue bribery was less frequent overall the results suggest the danger of uncoordinated rent seeking as government structures become more complex

china s food economy to the twenty first century supply demand and trade this paper accounts for the structural changes now taking place in china and suggests that china is not likely to become either an enormous importer or exporter of grain ultimately though china s grain balances will depend on decisions made by chinese policymakers rather than natural resource constraints p v this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the impact of global warming on agriculture a ricardian analysis reply we measure the economic impact of climate on land prices using cross sectional data on climate farmland prices and other economic and geophysical data for almost 3 000 counties in the united states we find that higher temperatures in all seasons except autumn reduce average farm values while more precipitation outside of autumn increases farm values applying the model to a global warming scenario shows a significantly lower estimated impact of global warming on u s agriculture than the traditional production function approach and in one case suggests that even without co sub 2 fertilization global warming may have economic benefits for agriculture 16 refs 5 figs 5 tabs

empirical determinants of corruption a sensitivity analysis many variables have been proposed by past studies as significant determinants of corruption this paper asks if their estimated impact on corruption is robust to alteration of the information set a global sensitivity analysis based on the leamer s extreme bounds analysis gives a clear answer five variables are robustly related to corruption corruption is lower in richer countries where democratic institutions have been preserved for a long continuous period and the population is mainly protestant corruption is instead higher where political instability is a major problem finally a country s colonial heritage appears to be a significant determinant of present corruption

openness country size and government size additional evidence from a large cross country panel abstract a body of influential research has suggested that there is a negative association between country size and government size and between country size and openness and these may account for the positive association between openness and government size estimation of several models from 41 year panel data for over 150 countries indicates that while pooled ols estimates support the foregoing scenario when cross country heterogeneity is taken into consideration through the fixed effects format there is little evidence of a negative association of country size with either government size or openness therefore it does not seem likely that positive association between openness and government size arises due to the mediating role of country size

research productivity and output growth in chinese agriculture recent attempts to quantify the sources of growth in chinese agriculture have attributed an exceptionally large share of this growth to the contemporary institutional and market reforms within china to analyze this important issue we use a newly constructed panel data set that includes an agricultural research or stock of knowledge variable our results suggest that while still a significant source of growth the direct growth promoting consequence of institutional change and market reforms have been overstated by these earlier studies research induced technical change accounts for a significant share 20 of the growth in agricultural output since 1965

do existing corruption levels matter in controlling corruption cross country quantile regression estimates abstract we examine the determinants of corruption using recent cross sectional data for nearly one hundred countries while the causes of corruption have drawn economists interest in recent years our main contribution is to examine the corruption determinants throughout the conditional distribution of corruption across nations are there different causes of corruption in highly corrupt nations compared to the least corrupt countries for instance we examine whether greater democracy and more economic freedom consistently reduce corruption among the most and the least corrupt our results for the significant determinants support some findings in the literature but also provide new conclusions in many cases quantile regression estimates are quite different from those from ols regressions among the most corrupt nations larger governments and greater economic freedom do not appear to reduce corruption but greater democracy seems to alleviate it our results suggest that some current corruption control policies may be reconsidered especially among the most corrupt and least corrupt nations

examining the use of national databases in a hedonic analysis of regional farmland values hedonic techniques have attracted the interest of economists as a means of measuring values of nonmarket goods by studying the market transactions of differentiated products such as automobiles and houses implied values and corresponding demand schedules can be estimated for underlying characteristics such as automobile safety features two car garages and air quality of residential neighborhoods the subject of this paper is farmland and estimating the values of characteristics such as soil productivity and erodibility in 1974 rosen and freeman independently developed theoretical models for differentiated consumer products that now serve as the basis for empirical estimates of marginal prices of product characteristics procedures to estimate demand schedules of underlying characteristics were outlined in palmquist 1984 palmquist 1989 further extended rosen s theoretical model to consider land as a differentiated factor

on the origins of gender roles women and the plough the study examines the historical origins of existing cross cultural differences in beliefs and values regarding the appropriate role of women in society we test the hypothesis that traditional agricultural practices influenced the historical gender division of labor and the evolution of gender norms we find that consistent with existing hypotheses the descendants of societies that traditionally practiced plough agriculture today have less equal gender norms measured using reported gender role attitudes and female participation in the workplace politics and entrepreneurial activities our results hold looking across countries across districts within countries and across ethnicities within districts to test for the importance of cultural persistence we examine the children of immigrants living in europe and the united states we find that even among these individuals all born and raised in the same country those with a heritage of traditional plough use exhibit less equal beliefs about gender roles today jel codes d03 j16 n30 copyright 2013 oxford university press

factors influencing illinois farmland values a hedonic model of illinois farmland values is estimated using county level cross section time series data explanatory variables include land productivity parcel size improvements distances to chicago and other large cities an urban rural index livestock production through swine operation scale and farm density measures population density income and inflation the inclusion of spatial and serial correlation components substantially improves the model fit farmland values decline with parcel size ruralness distance to chicago and large cities and swine farm density and increase with soil productivity population density and personal income

operational performance of the bangladesh rural electrification program and its determinants with a focus on political interference abstract this article tries to quantitatively capture the effect of political intervention on the operational performance of the bangladesh rural electrification program rep firstly efficiency changes over the last 15 years of rural electric cooperatives in the rep are examined using data envelopment analysis dea then the critical determinants of the efficiency changes including political indicator are identified with an application of the tobit model results from the dea analysis show the overall efficiency score on a scale of zero to one changes in the 0 856 0 929 range in 15 years with two turnaround points in 1996 and 2001 these are the years that the national elections were held the results also find a gap between the efficient rural electric cooperatives and the inefficient rural electric cooperatives the results of the tobit model imply that political power has a negative impact on efficiency

the determinants of corruption in transition economies abstract this paper examines the determinants of corruption in transition economies we found that the progress of structural reform comprising marketization rule of law and democratization had a crucial impact on the extent of corruption control in former socialist countries

corruption and market competition evidence from post communist countries summary this paper empirically examines whether market competition is associated with greater bribe payments we use firm level data from the business environment and enterprise performance surveys since market competition could be endogenous and some firms report zero bribes we employ a tobit estimation methodology instrumenting for market competition we find that greater market competition increases the amount of bribes paid results are robust across several measures of market competition however market competition is less strongly associated with bribes in the presence of other obstacles of doing business that could also lead to more bribes

global policy of rural electrification energy poverty and lack of electricity in the rural area exacerbate the poverty of the developing countries the sustainable renewable technologies can be considered as efficient tools to reduce energy poverty whenever they are conducted based on an appropriate policy electricity can improve the human s lifestyle by increasing the level of health education welfare and technology currently sub sahara africa with only 14 2 of rural electrification has the first rank in the world with lowest access to electricity in that region around 585 million citizens has almost no access to electricity the present study focuses on the general global policies to electrify the rural areas in this regard variety of plans and programs conducted by governmental and private institutes are investigated in the year 2011 the international energy agency iea has developed three global strategies based on the world energy market that defines the overall world energy approach in the present work different technologies for rural electrification are taken into account in two major categories of grid connected and off grid systems furthermore based on sustainable development with emphasis on environmental consideration the feasibility of electrification by using different types of renewable energies such as solar biomass hydro wind and wave have been studied despite reliability of grid connection results indicate that renewable energy sources are the best choice especially in areas far from grid connections challenges between financial institutes and executive agencies result in resource management and technology development in order to overcome existing barriers and issues

underdevelopment and the economics of corruption a game theory approach abstract previous attempts to treat corruption are surveyed critically a game theory approach is preferred on the grounds that it can most effectively explain the basis for decisions of reasonable men to be corrupt a simple model is presented showing how bribery might be a dominant strategy a prisoner s dilemma type of situation emerges with the added complication that the judge and jailer may be corrupt other conclusions are that one official will not accept bribes from more than one firm it is impossible to predict which firm will win the contract no obvious solution emerges and legal remedies are discounted this paper then reviews the principal general equilibrium effects and concludes that their likely effect on economic development is negative

decentralization and corruption evidence across countries the relationship between decentralization of government activities and the extent of rent extraction by private parties is an important element in the recent debate on institutional design the theoretical literature makes ambiguous predictions about this relationship and it has remained virtually unexamined by empiricists the authors make a first attempt at examining the issue empirically by looking at the cross country relationship between fiscal decentralization and corruption as measured by a number of different indices their estimates suggest that fiscal decentralization in government spending is significantly associated with lower corruption moreover they find that the origin of a country s legal system for example civil versus common legal code performs extremely well as an instrument for decentralization the estimated relationship between decentralization when so instrumented and corruption is even stronger the evidence suggests a number of interesting areas for future work including investigating whether there are specific services for which decentralized provision has a particularly strong impact on political rent extraction and understanding the channels through which decentralization succeeds in keeping corruption in check

food self sufficiency comparative advantage and agricultural trade a policy analysis matrix for chinese agriculture revised china s rapid economic growth and gradual transition toward a market economy have brought about significant changes in production and consumption patterns and trade behavior in agriculture in this study the authors assess the comparative advantage and protection of china s major agricultural crops using a modified policy analysis matrix ipami and data from 1996 to 1998 results strongly suggest that china has a comparative advantage in labor intensive crops and a disadvantage in land intensive crops

the costs of indonesian sugar policy a policy analysis matrix approach indonesian sugar policy is a complex web of contradictory policies including mandatory production price supports and fertilizer and credit subsidies the policy analysis matrix pam was developed by monke and pearson to provide a more complete perspective on social profitability and the divergence between private and social costs than other commonly used social cost benefit measures the pam is used to analyze the effects of indonesian sugar policy on sugar production in irrigated and dryland areas on java the main sugar producing region in indonesia and to identify the distribution of resource transfers

forced sales and house prices the market for housing differs in several important ways from the textbook model of a liquid asset market with exogenous fundamentals this implies that the price at which a house is sold can be influenced not only by general supply and demand conditions but also by idiosyncratic factors including the urgency of the sale and the effects of the ownership transfer on the physical quality of the house first houses are productive only when people are living in them owning an empty house is equivalent to throwing away the dividend on a financial asset second houses are fragile assets that need maintenance and are vulnerable to van dalism unoccupied houses are particularly vulnerable and expensive to protect third short term rental contracts involve high transactions costs resulting from the moving costs of renters and the need of homeowners to protect their property against damage fourth houses are expensive indivisible and heterogeneous assets each house has certain unique characteristics which are likely to appeal to certain poten tial buyers and not to others so selling a house requires matching it with an appro priate buyer because of the high costs of intermediation in housing this task is normally undertaken by a real estate broker rather than a dealer fifth most home owners must finance their purchases using mortgages collateralized debt contracts that transfer home ownership to the mortgage lender through a foreclosure process if the homeowner defaults the expansion of mortgage credit in the early 2000s and the recent decline in house prices have led to an unprecedented increase in foreclosures since 2006 foreclosures transfer houses to financial institutions which must maintain and pro tect them until they can be sold foreclosed houses are likely to sell at low prices both because they may have been physically damaged during the foreclosure pro cess and because financial institutions have an incentive to sell them quickly in a liquid market an asset can be sold rapidly with a minimal impact on its price but

a model of negotiated sales applied to real estate auctions abstract recently real estate auctions have grown substantially in depressed markets this article develops a framework to compare the performance of auctions to that of negotiated sales first the article solves a search model that incorporates unforeseen shocks and compares how prices respond in the short run and long run next auctions are considered auctions are shown to obtain discounts because a quick sale results in a poorer match between house and buyer on average than could be obtained by waiting longer for a buyer the model predicts that auction discounts should be larger in down markets with high vacancies and in less dense markets

corruption in public service delivery experience from south asia s water and sanitation sector summary this paper presents empirical information regarding the types and magnitude of corrupt behaviors documented in water supply and sanitation service provision in several south asian localities it also examines the strengths and weaknesses of current strategies to reduce corruption among several public water and sanitation bureaucracies in south asia drawing on interviews and focus group discussions with more than 1 400 staff customers and key informants where corruption has been reduced two concomitant drivers are observed a shift in the accountability networks of service providers and a change in the work environment that increases the moral cost of misconduct 2003 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

corruption and democracy abstract most models and empirical tests of the relationship between corruption and democracy assume corruption falls as democracy matures yet recent theoretical developments and case evidence suggest an inverted u relationship between the two although so far no one has tested for this relationship by drawing on a panel data set covering a large number of countries between 1982 1997 substantial empirical support is found for an inverted u relationship between the durability age of democracy and corruption fortunately the turning point in corruption occurs rather early in the life of new democracies between 10 12 years

economic regulations red tape and bureaucratic corruption in post communist economies summary should state regulatory involvement in the economy necessarily generate corruption while excessive regulatory burden is often treated as a cause of corruption this paper argues otherwise it distinguishes regulatory policy or de jure regulatory regimes from regulatory implementation and offers a more nuanced argument about the relationship between state regulations and bureaucratic corruption the analysis of business survey data covering 25 post communist economies demonstrates that mechanisms of regulatory implementation rather than heavy handed regulatory policy are responsible for bribery this analysis draws attention to the theoretical distinction between different types of regulatory hurdles and their differential effects on the quality of governance

agricultural land markets and soil erosion policy relevance and conceptual issues farmland values dwarf all other asset values in agricultural production therefore understanding the formation and roles of farmland prices should command high research priority while we have seen some clarification of the pricing of farmland through time from an aggregate perspective other questions remain enigmas one is the relationship among land prices soil erosion and conservation investments understanding that relationship is critical to designing effective public soil conservation policy in the past the notion that the farmland market was generally not sensitive to varying erosion conditions was seemingly endorsed without systematic data analysis miranowski and hammes note the paucity of good empirical evidence for testing the effect of erosion on farmland prices two probable reasons for this lack of empirical study are worth citing first the legitimacy of public soil conservation assistance programs was not challenged then unlike the present thus there was not a compelling social need to understand whether farmland markets were transmitting proper signals to landowners with regard to erosion s effects second thorough and rigorous empirical tests of the relationship between land prices and erosion or conservation conditions are painstakingly detailed work fraught with many conceptual and measurement complications this paper has three sections in the first the policy context surrounding land prices and soil erosion is discussed we then report some empirical work on the erosion land price question with emphasis on specification issues surrounding an implicit price model implications for soil conservation policy and further research close the discussion

enforcement and political power in anticorruption evidence from china summary few empirical studies focused on the role of officials in the anticorruption enforcement especially in the authoritarian regime this paper uses linear panel data models with various control variables to investigate how the power of the government official in an anticorruption agency may impact the effectiveness of anticorruption campaign in china two types of political power are considered formal power is obtained when the discipline inspection secretary is also named as a vice party secretary of the province whereas informal power arises when the secretary used to work with the party secretary of the province it is found that both the formal and informal power of the secretary of the chinese communist party s discipline inspection commission i e the head of the anticorruption agency help enhance the number of corruption cases under investigation this result offers evidence to further explore how and why the anticorruption enforcement officials play their roles in a developing transitional country

still different after all these years solidarity behavior in east and west germany abstract using data from laboratory experiments we find that east germans show consistently less solidarity than west germans there has been no convergence in the 20 years after the reunification while it has recently been estimated that political values converge 20 to 40 years after the reunification alesina and fuchs schundeln 2007 we conclude from our findings that social behavior changes more slowly than political values we hypothesize that this is due to complementarities involved in individual social behavior and the necessity to coordinate on social norms on the society level

hedonic valuation of farmland using sale prices versus appraised values farmland provides agricultural products and natural amenities as well as residential sites the emergence of exurbanization appears to be changing the demand for natural amenities and their role in determining land values to better understand how appraised value and sale price capture the determinants of farmland value in a region facing exurbanization this study applies the hedonic method to land transaction data in southwestern michigan during 2003 2007 results suggest that appraised values are a poor substitute for sale prices if the research goal is to understand dynamically evolving determinants of land value in exurbanizing regions especially the value of natural amenities

sorting through global corruption determinants institutions and education matter not culture abstract identifying the robust determinants of corruption among cultural economic institutional and geographical factors has proven difficult from a policy perspective it is important to know whether inherent largely unchangeable attributes are responsible or if institutional and economic attributes are at work accounting for model uncertainty we use bayesian model averaging bma to analyze a comprehensive list of 36 potential corruption determinants across 123 countries covering 87 percent of the world population the bma methodology sorts through all 68 719 476 736 possible model combinations 2 36 in order to carve out the robust correlates we then take a step toward alleviating endogeneity concerns in an instrumental variable bma framework our results indicate that cultural factors are largely irrelevant whereas particular economic and institutional characteristics matter the rule of law emerges as the most persistent predictor with a posterior inclusion probability pip in the true model of 1 00 whereas we find strong evidence for government effectiveness pip of 0 88 urbanization 0 85 and the share of women in parliament 0 80 as meaningful determinants of lower corruption levels in developing countries the extent of primary schooling enters as a powerful factor with a pip of 1 00

corruption and inefficiency theory and evidence from electric utilities we investigate the determinants of the efficiency of firms with a focus on the role of corruption we construct a simple theoretical model where corruption increases factor requirements of firms because it diverts managerial effort away from factor coordination we then exploit a unique dataset comprising firm level information on 80 electricity distribution firms from 13 latin american countries for the years 1994 to 2001 as predicted by the model we find that more corruption in the country is strongly associated with more inefficient firms in the sense that they employ more inputs to produce a given level of output the economic magnitude of the effects is large the results hold both in models with country and firm fixed effects the results survive several robustness checks including different measures of output and efficiency and instrumenting for corruption other elements associated with inefficiency are public ownership inflation and lack of law and order but corruption appears to play a separate and more robust role

bureaucratic corruption and endogenous economic growth there appears to be significant diversity in the incidence of bureaucratic corruption across countries at different stages of economic development and under different political and economic regimes little theoretical or empirical analysis has been offered however on the link between corruption government and growth the paper attempts to fill the void through equilibrium models of endogenous growth balanced growth is derived as a balancing act between accumulating human capital which engenders growth and accumulating political capital which mainly assures bureaucratic power the analysis focuses on the interplay between investment in these two types of capital and its implications for long term growth under alternative political regimes some propositions are tested and confirmed empirically

a free press is bad news for corruption abstract this paper tests the proposition that a free press may be a powerful control on corruption we find evidence of a significant relationship between more press freedom and less corruption in a large cross section of countries this result is robust to specification and sample and the relationship is not sensitive to the choice of a particular measure of corruption or of press freedom furthermore we present evidence which suggests that the direction of causation runs from higher press freedom to lower corruption

price formation in farm land markets four models of price formation incorporating search and bargaining concepts were specified for an australian farm land market the models were estimated using primary data obtained from land buyers a sequential four equation model of buyer seller behavior was selected as conceptually superior substantively final prices were closer to buyers bid prices than sellers offer prices buyers valued soil conservation and proximity to town more highly and property productivity and size less highly than the sellers and market information had a positive influence on price in this area education may be preferable to subsidies for achieving soil conservation

measuring the contributions of site characteristics to the value of agricultural land this study examines the effects of different combinations and qualities of selected site characteristics on the value of agricultural land in six substate regions in washington state the analysis follows the general hedonic regression form but incorporates nonnegativity constraints on the models this coupled with an adaptation of bierens s conditional moment test yields consistent results showing a land value is a function of site characteristics b land markets in washington state are highly regional c parsimonious empirical models can provide adequate representations of expected land values and d nonnegative truncation is a valuable procedure in hedonic models

performance and efficiency in colombia s power distribution system effects of the 1994 reform we assess evolution in performance efficiency and productivity of colombia s power distribution utilities before and after the 1994 regulatory reform that introduced electricity market activities for the power sector in 12 distribution companies from 1985 to 2001 performance is evaluated contrasting changes in mean and median by wilcoxon rank sum and pearson tests on financial and other performance indicators technical efficiency is measured by means of data envelopment analysis dea the nature of the dataset allows the estimation of malmquist productivity index and its evolution in time results show a recovery after the reform in the main performance indicators of profitability partial input productivity and output plant efficiency and productivity increased after the reform mainly in the largest utilities used as benchmarks in the dea efficiency scores measures meanwhile the less efficient power distribution companies did not improved after the reform and were not able to undertake plant restructuring to catch up in plant efficiency with respect to the pareto efficient input allocations econometric results on dea efficiency scores suggest a positive effect of policy reform

democracy rent seeking public spending and growth abstract does democratization imply faster growth less corruption and less inefficiency past studies yield ambiguous results on the effects of democracy on economic performance and growth we develop a simple two sector endogenous growth model that shows both very young and mature democracies grow faster than countries in mid stages of democratization producing a u effect this effect results from the pattern of rent seeking as it diverts from the provision of public goods rent seekers act as monopolistic competitors initially more democracy increases their number raising aggregate rents however rents per rent seeker fall with the number of rent seekers due to this crowding effect and the increased competition among rent seekers aggregate rents fall in mature democracies thus rents show an inverted u effect in relation to democracy we find fairly robust supportive evidence for the latter

research and development aspects on decentralized electrification options for rural household abstract low income households living in the rural areas suffer from energy poverty and lack of human and economic development currently many governments of less developed countries are committed in improving access to electricity the same commitment should be adapted globally as part of human right because providing electricity access to low income households improves health and education generates income increases productivity reduces inequality and enhances the quality of life rural electrification is a complicated issue because of user affordability rural inaccessibility and remoteness low population densities and dispersed households low project profitability fiscal deficit scarcity of energy resources population growth lack of professionalism and over dependence on subsidies the demand for electrification cannot be accomplished because of the increasing gap between rural electrification rate and population growth therefore this review aims to study various decentralized household sized energy technologies available in rural areas such as battery diesel generator pedal generator pico hydro photovoltaic pv solar home system and wind preference for one of the options depends on energy source availability economic feasibility rural economic development disposal of residues nature of end user application and government programs and policies pico hydro is the preferred electricity generation source in most rural households followed by wind pv and diesel generators this paper concurs that households in rural areas will be able to afford for electricity access if the payment schedule of the electrification cost is extended and interest rates and taxes if any are dropped

forced sales and farmland prices we analyze farmland prices in the german federal state of brandenburg from 2000 to 2011 with the aim to understand the price formation process in farmland foreclosures pressured sales usually result in a price discount due to time constraints however the land is sold using public auctions this may lead to a price premium since the effect of a foreclosure on farmland prices is ambiguous we empirically quantify the overall effect we use matching techniques and a regression based approach we find that on average price premiums are realized though the effect depends on prevailing land market conditions

estimating irrigation water value using hedonic price analysis a case study in malheur county oregon hedonic price analysis is applied to agricultural land sales to reveal the implicit market price of water in irrigation this provides price information where otherwise absent which can facilitate reallocation of water supplies to meet growing demands the failure to include available information on soil quality an impor tant determinant of agricultural land value re sults in erroneous conclusions joint testing of heteroskedasticity and functional form is demon strated the value of irrigation water in this loca tion is estimated at 9 for an acre foot on the least productive land irrigated and up to 44 per acre foot on the most productive land jel q15