the income elasticity of non point source air pollutants revisiting the environmental kuznets curve abstract this paper examines the income pollution relationship for three non point source pollutants in 1990 ambient concentrations reported at monitors throughout the us are regressed on median household income and other socio economic variables for the census tracts in which the monitors were located contrary to earlier studies a u shaped relationship is obtained

policy reform and productivity change in chinese agriculture a distance function approach abstract agricultural policy reform has been an important source of change in the chinese agricultural sector the reforms led to productivity growth and helped china to pursue its self sufficiency goal especially in the grain sector in order to analyze whether observable productivity growth stems from technologically induced components or from the market induced parts a multi input multi output model is derived by using an econometric distance function framework a decomposition allows to distinguish allocative effects scale effects technological change and technical efficiency change data on farms in zhejiang from 1986 to 2000 are used to analyze the impact of policy reform

land clearance and social capital in mountain agro ecosystems the case of opuntia scrubland in ayacucho peru abstract opuntia scrublands are important ecological economic systems in rural andean areas they provide goods for peasants diet and animal feed as well as cochineal insects a highly valued source of dyes land clearance on these scrublands promotes changes in land use from nonproductive wilderness to cochineal and fruit harvest areas grazing lands and fuel wood supply zones here we empirically explore the role of social capital on land clearance based on a case study of the humanga region of ayacucho peru the literature on social capital is showing evidence of the positive effect of social capital on development actions and on environmental conservation in rural areas of developing countries such as participatory forest management here the notion of social capital is captured by the idea that some features of social organization such as networks facilitate coordination and cooperation within the peasant communities that help in managing different economic activities both on and off farm the habilitation of the scrublands in the andean mountain environment could be generating negative externalities as a consequence of altering the vegetation cover such as soil erosion because the benefits arising from land clearance activities are obtained by cochineal collecting households and the negative environmental effects are costs imposed upon noncochineal collectors the social capital associated with scrubland habilitation could be perverse from an agro environmental viewpoint and a revision of some government policies and of some ngos actions for rural development through the promotion of various community networks in this deprived area could be needed

the intergenerational earnings and income mobility of canadian men evidence from longitudinal income tax data our objective is to obtain an accurate estimate of the degree of intergenerational income mobility in canada we use income tax information on about 400 000 father son pairs and find intergenerational earnings elasticities to be about 0 2 earnings mobility tends to be slightly greater than income mobility but nonparametric techniques uncover significant nonlinearities in both of these relationships intergenerational earnings mobility is greater at the lower end of the income distribution than at the upper end and displays an inverted v shape elsewhere intergenerational income mobility follows roughly the same pattern but is much lower at the very top of the income distribution

intergenerational transfers in philippine rice villages gender differences in traditional inheritance customs abstract this paper examines education land and nonland asset transfers from parents to children in five rice villages in the philippines a model with family fixed effects explains transfers better than either individual heterogeneity or observed parent and child characteristics without family fixed effects families facing different land constraints exhibit significantly different patterns of educational investment in children in a subsample with completed inheritance daughters receive less education land and total inheritance but are compensated with nonland assets parents also exhibit preferential behavior towards children of the same gender daughters of better educated mothers receive more land nonland assets and total inheritance better educated fathers give land preferentially to sons but favor daughters in education

is social capital declining in the united states a multiple indicator assessment despite a great deal of interest in a possible decline of social capital in the united states scholars have not reached a consensus on the trend this article improves upon previous research by providing a model of social capital that has explicit links to theories of social capital and that analyzes multiple indicators of social capital over a 20 year period the results do not consistently support putnam s claim of a decline in social capital showing instead some decline in a general measure of social capital a decline in trust in individuals no general decline in trust in institutions and no decline in associations

a caveat on the measurement of productive efficiency abstract the correspondence between used performance measures and enterprise objectives such as profit maximization and cost minimization is fundamental for manufacturing companies this paper identifies and critically examines a minimal set of relevant properties that a productivity index needs to satisfy to rightly assess performance development of a decision making unit commonly applied and suggested productivity measurement techniques such as partial efficiencies total factor productivity tfp index number approaches integrated partial efficiencies and operational competitiveness ratings are analyzed in order to assess the alignment with superior objectives there is a considerable spread in the results of this class of models and the interpretation may prove difficult or misleading as these apparently less complicated productivity measures increasingly are employed as a component in evaluation of manufacturing efficiency the question is of high managerial relevance in particular the paper points out inconsistencies with properties related to commensurability monotonicity and implications of maximizing behavior based on this viewpoint issues such as the consistency with profit maximization will be shown extra interest the paper also provides a critique of previous work in non parametric efficiency analysis where properties have been postulated or based on other arguments the findings suggest that there is no globally superior measurement technique to be found in this class and that care should be taken when evaluating managerial performance not to penalize rational behavior

analysis of environmental efficiency variation in this article we develop and implement a methodology for analyzing the sources of variation in environmental efficiency across producers we formulate a two stage model in the first stage we use stochastic frontier analysis to estimate both technical and environmental efficiency in the second stage we again use stochastic frontier analysis to regress estimated environmental efficiency scores against a variety of technology physical environment and management variables in this stage we estimate the impact of each explanatory variable on environmental efficiency and we derive conditional estimates of environmental efficiency from the one sided error component we illustrate our methodology with an empirical application to a panel of dutch dairy farms we find evidence of relatively low levels of environmental efficiency and we find that environmental efficiency can be improved through a number of policy options including the provision of farmers with more insight into the nutrient balance of their farms

rich dad smart dad decomposing the intergenerational transmission of income we construct a simple model consistent with becker and tomes that decomposes the intergenerational income elasticity into the causal effect of financial resources the mechanistic transmission of human capital and the role that human capital plays in the determination of fathers permanent incomes we show how a particular set of instrumental variables could separately identify the money and human capital transmission effects using data from a 35 percent sample of swedish sons and their fathers we show that only a minority of the intergenerational income elasticity can be plausibly attributed to the causal effect of fathers financial resources

confronting the environmental kuznets curve t he environmental kuznets curve posits an inverted u relationship between pollution and economic development kuznets s name was apparently attached to the curve by grossman and krueger 1993 who noted its resemblance to kuznets s inverted u relationship between income inequality and development in the first stage of industrialization pollution in the environmental kuznets curve world grows rapidly because people are more interested in jobs and income than clean air and water communities are too poor to pay for abatement and environmental regulation is correspondingly weak the balance shifts as income rises leading industrial sectors become cleaner people value the environment more highly and regulatory institutions become more effective along the curve pollution levels off in the middle income range and then falls toward pre industrial levels in wealthy societies the environmental kuznets curve model has elicited conflicting reactions from researchers and policymakers applied econometricians have generally accepted the basic tenets of the model and focused on measuring its parameters their regressions typically fitted to cross sectional observations across countries or regions suggest that air and water pollution increase with development until per capita income reaches a range of 5000 to 8000 when income rises beyond that level pollution starts to decline as shown in the conventional ekc line in figure 1 in developing countries some policymakers have interpreted such results as conveying a message about priorities grow first then clean up numerous critics have challenged the conventional environmental kuznets curve both as a representation of what actually happens in the development process and as a policy prescription some pessimistic critics argue that crosssectional evidence for the environmental kuznets curve is nothing more than a

on the intergenerational transmission of economic status we present a model in which human capital investments occur over the life cycle and across generations a la becker and tomes the human capital technology features multiple stages of childhood investments college and life cycle accumulation the model can explain a wide range of intergenerational relationships while remaining empirically consistent with cross sectional inequality much of the latter is determined by early investments in children so that borrowing constraints faced by young parents are important for understanding the persistence of economic status across generations education subsidies especially early on can significantly reduce the intergenerational persistence of economic status

intergenerational mobility and sample selection in short panels using data from the first 11 waves of the bhps this paper measures the extent of the selection bias induced by standard coresidence conditions bias that is expected to be severe in short panels on measures of intergenerational mobility in occupational prestige we try to limit the impact of other selection biases such as those induced by labour market restrictions that are typically imposed in intergenerational mobility studies by using different measures of socio economic status that account for missing labour market information we stress four main results first there is evidence of an underestimation of the true intergenerational elasticity the extent of which ranges between 12 and 39 second the proposed methods used to correct for the selection bias seem to be unable to attenuate it except for the propensity score weighting procedure which performs well in most circumstances this result is confirmed both under the assumption of missing at random data as well as under the assumption of not missing at random data third the two previous sets of results direction and extent of the bias and differential abilities to correct for it are also robust when we account for measurement error fourth restricting the sample to a period shorter than the 11 waves under analysis leads to a severe sample selection bias in the cases when the analysis is limited to eight waves this bias ranges from about 40 to 65 copyright 2006 john wiley sons ltd

does social capital promote industrialization evidence from a rapid industrializer a new stylized fact in development economics is the importance of social capital in promoting economic growth this paper examines the effect of social capital on industrialization in indonesia we analyze a rich set of social capital and social interaction measures including voluntary associational activity and levels of trust and informal cooperation the main finding is that initial social capital does not predict subsequent industrial development across 274 indonesian districts though these findings are for only a single nation and may not apply everywhere they call into question recent claims regarding social capital and economic development

neoclassical growth the j curve for abatement and the inverted u curve for pollution abstract this paper reexamines the neoclassical environmental growth model of forster to gain insights into the dynamic relationships among pollution abatement effort and economic development whereas the model has heretofore been used to examine steady state levels of capital consumption and environmental quality it also provides a theoretical basis for recent empirical research on j curves for abatement effort and inverted u curves for pollution

the spanish beef sector in the 1990s impact of the bse crisis on efficiency and profitability the beef sector has undergone a series of changes as a result of successive food scares and agricultural policy reforms the purpose of the paper is to analyse technical efficiency and profitability in spanish livestock enterprises during the 1990s focusing on the possible impact of the bse crisis and the 1992 cap reform on each of these variables the main findings reveal the existence of technical inefficiency during the sample period some factors have a positive impact others a negative impact on efficiency as far as the effects of cap reform and the bse crisis are concerned the results show the ineffectiveness of agricultural policy regulation to promote efficiency in the sector and the improvement in the efficiency as a consequence of the bse crisis the profitability analysis reveals the importance of direct subsidies however in their absence a large percentage of holdings is unable to remunerate either own or rented factors analysis shows therefore that there are two counteracting effec

an alternative analysis of apparent ekc type transitions abstract the hypothesis of the environmental kuznets curve ekc depends upon the assumption that countries pass through a similar environmental impact trajectory as they experience income growth implying that income levels determine pollution levels the authors present evidence that this is not representative of the way many individual country s pollution emission trajectories evolve and question the emphasis on income determinism by the ekc the study proposes that nonlinear dynamic systems analysis provides a more complete description of individual country pollution trajectories in the case of co 2 emissions the nonlinear time trajectories show abrupt transitions that occur contemporaneously with historical events and over a broad range of incomes

the environmental kuznets curve under a new framework the role of social capital in water pollution we advance a case for including social capital in an environmental kuznets curve analysis using highly disaggregated data of water pollution in louisiana we create a social capital index and employ parametric and spatial panel regression models to explain water pollution dynamics

provision of environmental output within a multi output distance function approach this paper redefines technical efficiency by incorporating provision of environmental goods as one of the outputs of the farm the proportion of permanent and rough grassland to total agricultural land area is used as a proxy for the provision of environmental goods stochastic frontier analysis was conducted using a bayesian procedure the methodology is applied to panel data on 215 dairy farms in england and wales results show that farm efficiency rankings change when provision of environmental outputs by farms is incorporated in the efficiency analysis which may have important political implications

regression toward mediocrity in economic stature this paper provides estimates of the correlation in lifetime earnings between fathers and sons intergenerational data from the national longitudinal survey are used earlier studies conducted for the united states report elasticities of children s earnings with respect to parent s earnings of 0 2 or less suggesting extensive integenerational mobility these estimates however are biased downward by error contaminated measures of lifetime economic status estimates presented in this paper correct for the problem of measurement error and find the intergenerational correlation in income to be on the order of 0 4 this suggests considerably less intergenerational mobility than previously believed jel j62

the intergenerational mobility of immigrants this article analyzes the intergenerational mobility of immigrants using the 1940 70 censuses the study reveals an important link between the earnings of immigrants and the earnings of their american born children although there is some regression toward the mean the earnings of second generation americans are strongly affected by variables describing economic conditions in the source countries of their parents current immigration policy therefore not only determines how immigrants perform in the labor market but also determines tomorrow s differences in the labor market experiences of american born ethnic groups

decomposition of productivity growth using distance functions the case of dairy farms in three european countries within an output distance function framework the total factor productivity growth index is decomposed into four components technical change technical and allocative efficiency and scale component we estimate stochastic translog output distance functions using panel data from dairy farms over the period 1991 94 for three european countries germany the netherlands and poland results indicate that the change in the productivity growth index in germany 6 and poland 5 are mainly dictated by the technical change component in contrast the productivity growth index in the netherlands 3 is influenced by allocative efficiency components

economic interpretations of intergenerational correlations science itself for example see galton s 1869 study of the eminence of relatives or his 1889 analysis of the heights of parents and children but extensive use of economic theory to interpret these correlations is much more recent using basic economic concepts such as supply demand investment incentives missing markets and so on theorists hope to explain how and why status is correlated across generations economic theory might provide a unified treatment of a variety of socioeconomic indicators such as earnings income occupation or wealth or it might predict how taxes subsidies and economic regulation affect intergenerational mobility and the operation of markets however while the subject matter earnings consumption wealth occupa tion is clearly interesting to economists it could nonetheless be the case that beyond basic questions of measurement economic theory has not improved our understanding of intergenerational mobility goldberger 1989 is quite explicit in this contention by emphasizing the distinction between genes and environment and by using statistical theory as its main analytical tool the paper by samuel bowles and herbert gintis in this issue implicitly concurs with goldberger we take this challenge very seriously what characterizes an economic approach to mobility while biologists and bowles and gintis distinguish endowments and investments by their source genetic versus environmental factors one focus of economic theorists is motiva

multilateral productivity comparisons when some outputs are undesirable a nonparametric approach multilateral productivity comparisons of firms producing multiple outputs some of which are undesirable are obtained by making two modifications to the standard farrell approach to efficiency measurement the restriction that production technology satisfy strong disposability of outputs is relaxed to allow for the fact that undesirable outputs may be freely disposable and the efficiency measures are modified to allow for an asymmetric treatment of desirable and undesirable outputs performance measures that satisfy these requirements are calculated as solutions to programming problems the methodology is applied to a sample of mills producing paper and pollutants

intergenerational top income mobility in sweden capitalist dynasties in the land of equal opportunity this paper presents new evidence on intergenerational mobility at the top of the income and earnings distributions using a large dataset of matched father son pairs in sweden we find that intergenerational transmission is very strong at the top more so for income than for earnings at the extreme top top 0 1 income transmission is remarkable with an intergenerational elasticity of approximately 0 9 we also study potential transmission mechanisms and find that iq non cognitive skills and education of the sons are all unlikely channels in explaining the strong transmission within the top percentile increases in the income of the fathers if they are related at all are negatively associated with these variables wealth on the other hand has a significantly positive association our results suggest that sweden known for having relatively high intergenerational mobility in general is a society in which transmission remains strong at the very top of the distribution and wealth is the most likely channel

economic and mechanical models of intergenerational transmission the author critically examines gary beckers attempt to integrate the theory of income distribution intragenerational differences with the theory of mobility intergenerational differences in an economic model of the family he assesses beckers claims of distinctiveness integration explanatory power and surprise and arrives at a rather skeptical view of the contribution that the core of microeconomics has made to this study of the family a reply by becker is included pp 514 8 excerpt

human capital heterogeneity and estimated degrees of intergenerational mobility we study the parental investment model of intergenerational mobility where heterogeneity in innate earnings ability and parents altruism rate is explicitly modelled we show that heterogeneity increases the difficulty of detecting the existence of borrowing constrained families conversely the presence of heterogeneity means that economic and linear statistical models of inheritance generate similar intergenerational data on consumption and earnings we also suggest that nay cross country differences in intergenerational earnings mobility are more readily interpreted according to the heterogeneity of inherited ability rather than optimal family responses to countiy specific institutions for accumulating human capital the relationship between a citizen s economic status and his family background is an important clue for understanding and evaluating a country s economic performance some eg bowles 1972 have suggested a close relationship between economic status and family background indicates some failure of labour markets or of institutions fostering investment in human capital others eg altonji et al 1992 mulligan 1997 table 4 1 have offered an apparently contradictory suggestion that efficient allocations involve a very close relationship on some measures between the economic status of parents and children still others find family background effects to be the most offensive sources of inequality regardless of whether those effects are consistent with efficiency empirical studies of this relationship date back to the earliest days of statistical social science eg galton s 1869 british study of the success and eminence of relatives and many can be found outside the field of economics see goode s 1966 survey for a few examples but the increasing availability of new data sets for exploring the relationship between earnings income wealth and consumption of parents and years later of adult children has appropriately led to new and better econometric estimates of intergenerational mobility or the intergenerational auto regression of various measures of economic status and has even permitted some careful comparisons of those estimates across countries however fewer results are available on interpreting such estimates in terms of economic models of inheritance or of the labour market loury 1981 and becker and tomes 1986 are among the exceptions where they show how access to capital markets or other means of

does parents money matter abstract this paper asks whether parents income per se has a positive impact on children s abilities previous research has established that income is positively correlated across generations this does not prove that parents money matters however since income is presumably correlated with ability this paper estimates the impact of parents income by focusing on income variation due to factors union industry and job loss that arguably represent luck i find that changes in parents income due to luck have a negligible impact on children s human capital for most families although parents money does matter for families whose father has low education

efficiency in new zealand sheep and beef farming the impacts of regulatory reform in this study we consider the impacts of dramatic regulatory reform during the 1980s on the efficiency of farms in new zealand using unbalanced panel data a translog distance function representing the multiple output and input technology and incorporating nonneutral regulatory impacts is used for the analysis determinants of technical inefficiency including a regulatory variable a time term and a debt equity ratio are also incorporated in a one step model estimated by maximum likelihood stochastic production frontier methods we find evidence of regulatory induced changes in output composition toward beef and deer and away from wool and especially lamb but little associated technical inefficiency these patterns motivated investment in complementary capital land and beef deer livestock inputs firms that were more flexible in their adaptation toward these new mixes adjusted to regulatory changes with less upheaval so any existing inefficiency appears linked to debt equity levels

cross country rankings in intergenerational mobility a comparison of approaches from economics and sociology this paper summarizes research on the relative level of intergenerational mobility whether classified by income education or social class the literatures on education and income mobility reveal a similar ranking with south america other developing nations southern european countries and france tending to have rather limited mobility although the nordic countries exhibit strong mobility estimates of mobility based on social class point to rather different patterns and we demonstrate that these differences are most likely generated by intergenerational earnings persistence within social classes the second part of the paper looks for explanations for the differences in earnings and education persistence and finds that mobility is negatively correlated with inequality and the return to education but positively correlated with a nation s education spending

galton versus the human capital approach to inheritance a century ago francis galton proposed a simple yet powerful model of inheritance gary backer s human capital model is often used to analyze important empirical and policy questions but does it dominate galton s from a positive point of view i derive nine implicatiions of the human capital approach that are distinct from galton s evidence from the pis scf and nlsy micro data sets as well as results reported in previous literatures suggest that four of the unique implications are refuted two implications are verified and mixed results are obtained for three others some extensions of economics recently developed by becker and others when applied to inheritance may improve economics predictions

econometric estimation of technical and environmental efficiency an application to dutch dairy farms in this article we estimate the technical and environmental efficiency of a panel of dutch dairy farms nitrogen surplus arising from the application of excessive amounts of manure and chemical fertilizer is treated as an environmentally detrimental input a stochastic translog production frontier is specified to estimate the output oriented technical efficiency environmental efficiency is estimated as the input oriented technical efficiency of a single input the nitrogen surplus of each farm the mean output oriented technical efficiency is rather high 0 894 but the mean input oriented environmental efficiency is only 0 441 intensive dairy farms are both technically and environmentally more efficient than extensive farms

human capital spillovers in families do parents learn from or lean on their children i model how children s acquisition of a given form of human capital incentivizes adults in their household to either learn from them if children can teach the skill to adults adults cost of learning falls or lean on them if children s human capital substitutes for that of adults in household production adults benefit from learning falls using variation in compliance with an english immersion mandate in california schools i find that english instruction improved immigrant children s english proficiency but discouraged adults living with them from acquiring the language whether family members learn or lean affects the externalities associated with education policies

income inequality development and dependence a reconsideration we reconsider the role of foreign investment in income inequality in light of recent critiques that question the results of quantitative cross national research on foreign capital penetration we analyze an unbalanced cross national data set in which countries contribute different numbers of observations with a maximum of 88 countries and 488 observations dated from 1967 to 1994 random effects regression models that control for unmeasured country heterogeneity are used to investigate effects of foreign capital penetration on inequality measured as the gini coefficient against the background of an internal developmental model of inequality we adapt firebaugh s 1992 1996 critique of the literature on the effect of foreign investment on economic growth to the study of income inequality and find that the stock of foreign direct investment has an effect on inequality that is independent of the mechanisms identified by firebaugh we explore tsai s 1995 claim that the effect of foreign capital penetration is spurious and find that foreign stock has a significant positive effect on inequality net of region specific differences an alternative interpretation of the findings of the foreign investment inequality literature is discussed in light of the discovery of an inverted u shaped relationship between income inequality and foreign investment stock per capita we conclude that thinking on the relationship between income inequality and investment dependence should be revised in light of an investment development path relating the inflow and outflow of foreign capital to economic development

patterns of intergenerational mobility in income and earnings this paper characterizes the patterns of intergenerational mobility in the united states using data for matched parent child pairs from the national longitudinal surveys in general what is found is far from the extremes of either perfect mobility or perfect immobility parents log income explains only about 9 percent to 11 percent of the variation in children s log incomes earnings exhibit more mobility than does total income and the difference is most striking for daughters the paper also identifies the influence of family background characteristics on mobility the addition of these background variables adds another 3 to 5 percent age points to the r2 in the intergenerational earnings and income regressions copyright 1992 by mit press

air quality and economic growth an empirical study abstract in the present empirical study we have observed an inverse and sometimes u shaped relationship between environmental degradation and per capita real income as opposed to the inverted u shaped environmental kuznets curve ekc found in many earlier studies it was felt that a possible explanation of the observed pattern of relationship might be sought in the dynamics of the process of economic growth experienced by the countries concerned thus e g economic development may strengthen the market mechanism as a result of which the economy may gradually shift from non market to marketed energy resources that are less polluting this phenomenon may show up in the form of an inverse relationship as mentioned above also due to the global technical progress the production techniques available to the countries all over the world are becoming more and more capital intensive and at the same time less polluting this may mean that given the income level the pollution level decreases as the capital intensity of an economy rises in the present study it is indeed observed that as capital intensity increases the level of suspended particulate matter spm in the atmosphere decreases per capita real income is also found to be inversely related to spm partially but the interaction effect of per capita income and capital intensity on spm is observed to be positive this suggests that given the level of per capita income capital intensity a more capital intensive production technique a higher per capita income level would cause less pollution for spm a surprising result is also obtained i e a u turn is observed at a very high level of per capita real income i e us 12 500 at 1985 us prices this is possibly indicative of the fact that there are technological limits to industrial pollution control such that beyond a threshold level of income further rise in income cannot be achieved without environmental degradation

intergenerational mobility and marital sorting we use data from the german socio economic panel and the british household panel survey to estimate the extent of intergenerational economic mobility in a framework that highlights the role played by assortative mating we find that assortative mating plays an important role on average about 40 50 of the covariance between parents and own permanent family income can be attributed to the person to whom one is married this effect is driven by strong spouse correlations in human capital which are larger in germany than britain 2006 the authors journal compilation royal economic society 2006

live long and prosper collective action social capital and social vision abstract to understand the social driving forces that lead to environmental change we must account for the role of social interactions the development of norms of behavior and the institutionalization of rules and norms the development of social capital this paper demonstrates the utility of social capital theory by articulating linkages between human decision making at individual and collective levels and social vision an important research focus within the emerging ecological economics research tradition social capital theory clarifies relationships between social interactions and outcomes that contribute to the production of environmental quality public peace and economic prosperity necessary factors for long term social and ecological sustainability

technical efficiency of european railways a distance function approach this study has two principal objectives the first objective is to measure and compare the performance of european railways the second objective is to illustrate the usefulness of econometric distance functions in the analysis of production in multioutput industries where behavioural assumptions such as cost minimization or profit maximization are unlikely to be applicable using annual data on 17 railways companies during 1988 1993 multioutput distance functions are estimated using corrected ordinary least squares cols the resulting technical efficiency estimates range from 0 980 for the netherlands to 0 784 for italy with a mean of 0 863 the distance function results are also compared with those obtained from single output production functions where aggregate output measures are formed using either total revenue or a tornqvist index the results obtained indicate substantial differences in parameter estimates and technical efficiency rankings casting significant doubt upon the reliability of

land use compatibility change and policy at the rural urban fringe insights from social capital cerning the level and quality of services to be provided in the community pendall and martin lacayo nonfarm development also impacts agriculture with the loss of farmland and the difficulties of farming amidst a large nonfarm population receiving considerable attention by citizens policy makers and academics american farmland trust successfully managing changes at the ruralurban interface requires improved data technical expertise and political leadership at all levels of government success also depends we believe on the existence of social capital in this article we focus on the importance of social capital in managing change at the rural urban interface our starting assumption is that individuals or communities with access

changing roles of ability and education in u s intergenerational mobility using data on young adults from the 1979 and 1997 national longitudinal survey of youth we investigate the changing roles of ability and education in the transmission of economic status across generations we find that ability plays a substantially diminished role for the most recent cohort whereas education plays a much larger role the first finding results primarily from a smaller effect of children s ability on status the second from an increased correlation between parental status and educational attainment a replication of the analysis by gender reveals that the changes in the role of ability are largely driven by men whereas the changes in education s role are largely driven by women jel j62 i24

the inheritance of inequality how level is the intergenerational playing field what are the causal mechanisms that underlie the intergenerational transmission of economic status are these mechanisms amenable to public policies in a way that would make the attainment of economic success more fair these are the questions we will try to answer

an overlapping generations model of growth and the environment this article analyzes the potential conflict between economic growth and the maintenance of environmental quality in an overlapping generations model short lived individuals make decisions which have long lasting effects on both factor productivity and the environment the model provides a theoretical explanation of observed correlations between environmental quality and income whereby economic growth is associated first with declines then improvements in environmental quality it suggests circumstances in which multiple pareto ranked steady state equilibria may arise and in which sustained growth of both capital and environmental quality may occur overmaintenance of the environment analogous to dynamically inefficient overaccumulation of capital may emerge copyright 1994 by royal economic society

an activity analysis model of the environmental performance of firms application to fossil fuel fired electric utilities the productivity of firms when some outputs pollution are undesirable has been studied in the literature for some time in this paper we introduce an environmental performance indicator based on the decomposition of overall factor productivity into a pollution index and an input output efficiency index this indicator is compared to the more conventional jaggi and freedman 1992 model results are given for illustrative purposes using data from u s fossil fuel fired electric utilities the rankings of the utilities obtained with the two models show significant divergence which is due to the different ways in which the undesirable outputs are dealt with as well as due to the different possible tradeoffs between the pollutants released into the atmosphere and the resources used as inputs

heterogeneity stratification and growth macroeconomic implications of community structure and school finance this paper examines how socioeconomic stratification and alternative systems of education finance affect inequality and growth agents interact through local public goods or externalities school funding neighborhood effects and economywide linkages complementary skills knowledge spillovers sorting families into homogeneous communities often minimizes the costs of existing heterogeneity but mixing reduces heterogeneity faster integration therefore tends to slow down growth in the short run yet raise it in the long run a move to state funding of education presents society with a similar intertemporal trade off local and global complementarities play major roles in determining the efficient social and educational structures copyright 1996 by american economic association

the political economy of intergenerational income mobility the intergenerational elasticity of income is considered one of the best measures of the degree to which a society gives equal opportunity to its members while much research has been devoted to measuring this reduced form parameter less is known about its underlying structural determinants using a model with exogenous talent endowments endogenous parental investment in children and endogenous redistributive institutions we identify the structural parameters that govern the intergenerational elasticity of income the model clarifies how the interaction between private and collective decisions determines the equilibrium level of social mobility two societies with similar economic and biological fundamentals may have vastly different degrees of intergenerational mobility depending on their political institutions we offer empirical evidence in line with the predictions of the model we conclude that international comparisons of intergenerational elasticity of income are not particularly informative about fairness without taking into account differences in politico economic institutions jel e24 j62 j68 p16