smallholder market participation concepts and evidence from eastern and southern africa abstract this paper reviews the evidence on smallholder market participation with a focus on staple foodgrains i e cereals in eastern and southern africa in an effort to help better identify what interventions are most likely to break smallholders out of the semi subsistence poverty trap that appears to ensnare much of rural africa the conceptual and empirical evidence suggests that interventions aimed at facilitating smallholder organization at reducing the costs of intermarket commerce and perhaps especially at improving poorer households access to improved technologies and productive assets are central to stimulating smallholder market participation and escape from semi subsistence poverty traps macroeconomic and trade policy tools appear less useful in inducing market participation by poor smallholders in the region

delegating climate policy to a supranational authority a theoretical assessment abstract this paper studies the delegation of climate policy to a supranational environmental authority we develop a simple model of a world consisting of a large number of countries which derive utility from energy consumption countries suffer from global warming and local air pollution both caused by the combustion of fossil fuels and decide individually on investments in clean technologies for energy production a supranational environmental authority decides for each country on the maximally permitted amount of greenhouse gas emissions we demonstrate that the authority faces a dynamic inconsistency problem that leads to welfare losses but these losses can be kept small if the authority is endowed with an optimally designed mandate the optimal mandate penalizes the cost of local air pollution very heavily relative to the cost of global warming however delegation of climate policy faces a further difficulty as countries have a recurrent incentive to change the authority s mandate over time

perfect equilibria in a trade liberalization game the credibility of temporary protection is examined in a simple infinite horizon perfect information game of timing in which the domestic government uses the threat of future liberalization to induce the domestic firm to invest all pure strategy subgame perfect equilibria are cyclical and surprisingly one of them implements optimal temporary protection however this equilibrium fails to pass another credibility criterion called renegotiation proof the game has a unique stationary subgame perfect equilibrium in mixed strategies copyright 1990 by american economic association

strategic responses to automobile emissions control a game theoretic analysis abstract this paper examines the dynamics of standard setting regulation under technological uncertainty and asymmetric information about technological capability a two period model which allows fully strategic action is developed and applied to the regulation of automobile emissions a situation in which standards have been used to force innovation it is found that the initial level of r d activity caused by regulation increases with the intrinsic technical capability of industry this result done not depend on marginal productivities of research that favor high capability types and implies that a poor capability industry will not attempt to compensate for its inability to innovate with increased research activity it is also found that the regulator s ability to induce investment is greater when r d is likely to be unsuccessful

economies of scope and the cash crop food crop debate in senegal abstract the government of senegal plans to achieve national food self sufficiency by inducing farmers to switch away from cash crops toward food crop production this paper examines selected economic consequences of the planned substitution using empirical data recently collected in southeastern senegal cost function estimates suggest that farmers are currently producing too much food crop and too little cash crop output given existing technology and observed relative prices moreover economies of scope in producing both food crops and cash crops on the same farm result in a 22 cost saving relative to growing both types of crops on separate specialized farms

forest resource use change during early market integration in tropical rain forests the huaorani of upper amazonia abstract this paper examines the impact of early market integration on the extraction of forest resources by traditional forest based households with emphasis on the commercial subsistence dichotomy empirical analysis of resource use transition among the huaorani people of the ecuadorian amazon shows that as markets become more accessible production patterns change but do not seem to affect subsistence production huaoranis increase the production of animal resources from forests however the extraction of harvested and primarily of farmed commodities seems not to be affected data also suggest that trade relies on limited specialization trade among the huaorani communities studied depends on raising the production of some of the same commodities that are found in the subsistence basket these changes are clearly explained if a flexible labor theory of early market integration is used this period is characterized by labor and land abundance and a relative ease to move labor from low return to more productive activities under these conditions market participation need not be accompanied by a reduction in the production of subsistence commodities or commodity specialization high risks and uncertainty and high transportation costs keep poor forest households from shifting completely to commercial activities this contrasts with a long presumption that production of individual commodities responds quickly to price changes based on demand shifts between products but that total output is slow to respond only after all the surplus labor has been allocated to productive activities total output becomes less flexible at this point increased production requires commodity or technological specialization

incentive effects of the u s welfare system a review the author would like to acknowledge support for prior work on this topic from the u s department of health and human services and helpful comments from three anonymous referees rebecca blank howard chernick john fitzgerald irwin garfinkel peter gottschalk edward gramlich david greenberg judith gueron james heckman v joseph hotz robert hutchens michael keane frank levy larry mead michael murray robert plotnick anuradha rangarajan philip robins howard rolston jeffrey smith and daniel weinberg all opinions and errors are those of the author alone

climate treaties and approaching catastrophes abstract if the threshold that triggers climate catastrophe is known with certainty and the benefits of avoiding catastrophe are high relative to the costs treaties can easily coordinate countries behavior so as to avoid the threshold where the net benefits of avoiding catastrophe are lower treaties typically fail to help countries cooperate to avoid catastrophe sustaining only modest cuts in emissions these results are unaffected by uncertainty about the impact of catastrophe by contrast uncertainty about the catastrophic threshold normally causes coordination to collapse whether the probability density function has thin or fat tails makes little difference

bargaining in environmental regulation and the ideal regulator abstract we present a model of environmental regulation in which the stringency of a firm s emissions standard is determined by cooperative bargaining between the firm and a regulator we show that bargaining can be socially beneficial because it can achieve the first best outcome this outcome is never an equilibrium of the noncooperative stackelberg game we also show that the social cost function is not the preferred objective function for a regulator when regulations are determined by bargaining social costs are lower with a regulator that attaches more importance to damages and enforcement costs than to the firm s compliance costs

smallholder production structure and rural roads in africa the case of nakuru district kenya data from a 1998 survey of farming households in kenya is used to estimate the effects of poor rural road infrastructure and high market access costs on the structure of smallholder farm production simultaneous estimation of cost and input share equations reveals rational responses by farmers to high access costs in the expected continued absence of major investments in rural infrastructure in countries such as kenya the policy challenge is to identify and catalyse institutional innovations that reduce a range of transaction costs increase financial liquidity increase social capital and reduce risk

food security strategies under extremely adverse conditions the determinants of household income and consumption in rural mozambique abstract this paper uses household survey data from war torn northern mozambique to examine the factors associated with higher incomes and improved rural household food security incomes and calorie consumption were found to be low and variable in each district and both are highly correlated with land holdings the central role of land holdings is largely a result of serious market failure food market participation rates and the proportion of net buyers are lower than in other sub saharan africa ssa research purchased food as a percentage of total caloric intake and off farm income as a percentage of total income are both very low by ssa standards in short surveyed smallholders have adopted a strategy of marked reliance on farm based own production to ensure their survival it is suggested that land holdings will continue to be key determinants of household income and consumption for the foreseeable future broad based rural development efforts possibly organized around existing cotton growing enterprises may offer one way out of the poverty trap for smallholders

solving the global warming problem beyond markets simple mechanisms may help his paper discusses the feasibility and performances of simple mechanisms to implement international environmental agreements in the multilateral externalities context of global warming asymmetric information and voluntary participation by sovereign and heterogeneous countries are key constraints on the design of those agreements mechanisms must prevent two sorts of free riding problems free riding in effort provision and free riding in participation as markets might fail to solve simultaneously those two problems we construct instead a simple menu of options that trades off the provision of incentives for participating countries and the provision of incentives to participate with such a mechanism all countries voluntarily contribute to a fund although at different intensities but only the most efficient ones effectively reduce their pollution below its business as usual level

climate cooperation with technology investments and border carbon adjustment a central question in climate policy is whether early investments in low carbon technologies are a useful first step towards a more effective climate agreement in the future we introduce a climate cooperation model with endogenous r d investments where countries protect their international competitiveness via border carbon adjustments bca bca raises the scope for cooperation and leads to a non trivial relation between countries prior r d investments and participation in the coalition we find that early investments in r d render free riding more attractive therefore with delayed cooperation on emission abatement and ex ante r d investments the outcome is often characterized by high participation but inefficiently low technology investments and abatement

border adjustments supplementing nationally determined carbon pricing as agreed on in the paris agreement each country determines its own contribution to combat climate change on a voluntary basis there is no mechanism to force a country to comply with its own nationally determined contributions this bottom up approach builds on unilateral actions and yields a kind of carbon pricing which is not necessarily identical across countries as a consequence these nationally determined climate policies have drawbacks in terms of carbon leakage and loss of competitiveness for firms producing in high carbon price countries to reduce these negative effects border adjustments bas may be appropriate subsequent to more stringent environmental regulation we model a three stage game involving carbon price competition in the first stage the introduction of bas in the second stage and oligopolistic competition between firms in the third stage strategic trade theory suggests that the qualitative results about the optimal ba policy may vary with the underlying type of competition namely bertrand and cournot competition however our results are similar for both types of competition we conclude that bas are suitable for supporting a more stringent environmental policy moreover we find that anticipation of the implementation of bas in the second stage yields higher average carbon prices in the first stage since high carbon price countries increase their carbon prices whereas the other countries partially offset

observed choice and optimism in estimating the effects of government policies a policy will be used more heavily in a time and place where its cost is lower the analyst who treats times and places as identical will overestimate the policy s net benefit especially for policy intensities greater than exist in his sample in regression analysis the problem can be solved by instrumental variables using state level data the technique substantially increases the estimated responsiveness of illegitimacy to transfers

contract duration and relationship specific investments empirical evidence from coal markets this paper examines the importance of specific relationship investments in determining the duration of coal contracts negotiated between coal suppliers and electric utilities data for 277 coal contracts are used to perform the analysis the results provide strong support for the view that buyers and sellers make longer commitments to the terms of future trade at the contract execution stage and rely less on repeated bargaining when relationship specific investments are more important

growing their own unobservable quality and the value of self provisioning abstract many important food quality and safety attributes are unobservable at the point of sale particularly in informal markets with weak reputation effects through a framed field experiment conducted in western kenya we show that farmers place a large premium on maize they have grown themselves relative to that available for purchase providing information on the origin of maize and on its taste and safety reduces this gap we conclude that information which is unavailable during typical market transactions is important to how consumers value maize and that imperfect information may contribute to the prevalence of agricultural production for subsistence needs in developing countries

international environmental agreements with mixed strategies and investment abstract we modify a canonical participation game used to study international environmental agreements iea considering both mixed and pure strategies at the participation stage and including a prior cost reducing investment stage the use of mixed strategies at the participation stage reverses a familiar result and also reverses the policy implication of that result with mixed strategies equilibrium participation and welfare are higher in equilibria that involve higher investment

new jersey s family cap experiment do fertility impacts differ by racial density using experimental design this research examines the impact of the nation s first family cap policy implemented in new jersey on the fertility behavior of welfare recipients we explore whether the change in welfare parameters mandated by the policy induces differential impact among black white and hispanic recipients we examine if impacts are conditioned by racial ethnic group concentration results show that reduced welfare payments have contributed to a decline in births for black women while we find a large response for blacks on average we find no response for blacks who live in geographic areas where they form a racial ethnic majority

redistributive taxation in a simple perfect foresight model abstract we investigate the redistributive potential of capital taxation in an intertemporal maximizing model of capital formation first even unanticipated redistributive capital taxation is severely limited in its effectiveness since it depresses wages second under any convergent redistributive tax policy which maximizes a paretian social objective the capital income tax will converge to zero independent of the factor supply elasticities these results are independent of workers holdings of capital

consumer response to maize market liberalization in urban kenya abstract the elimination of consumer food subsidies associated with structural adjustment in africa has been widely thought to exacerbate food insecurity for low income consumers this article determines how urban maize consumption and expenditure patterns have responded to the liberalization of the maize and maize meal markets in kenya the article decomposes changes in maize meal prices attributable to changes in maize grain prices and maize milling margins results are obtained through two random household surveys in nairobi the first having been conducted before and the second after liberalization the main finding of the study is that maize market liberalization has conferred substantial benefits to urban consumers the combined saving to nairobi consumers from lower maize milling costs has been roughly us 10 1 million each year about the same amount that the government of kenya allocates annually to agricultural research results also indicate that the former consumer subsidies conferred through the official marketing channel were untargeted and actually inversely related to household income the subsidies on sifted meal also served to entrench a non competitive market structure that inhibited the development of a lower cost informal milling system these findings are consistent with research results from other eastern and southern african countries showing that the negative effects of eliminating food subsidies in the state marketing system have been largely compensated by relaxing controls on private grain trade which has increased consumers access to less expensive grain products distributed through informal markets

impacts of prices and transactions costs on input usage in a liberalizing economy evidence from tanzanian coffee growers despite improvements in production incentives agricultural output in africa remained sluggish through the 1990s low use of purchased inputs may be part of the cause of persistently low productivity in african agriculture this article analyzes the roles of relative prices and transactions costs in explaining low use of chemical inputs among tanzanian coffee growers a sample selection model indicates that output prices exert great influence on input purchases and that both fixed and variable transactions costs affect input use decisions travel costs in input and output markets have distinct effects on input usage implying distinct avenues for interventions to promote more intensive use of agricultural inputs

the price of virtue this article offers new evidence on the determinants of u s unwed birth rates from 1981 to 1990 we show that illegitimacy rates are positively and significantly correlated with payments under the aid to families with dependent children program over a period in which real afdc payments declined we attribute this result to a decline in the social sanctions for illegitimacy because social sanctions declined so did the cost of deviance as well as the price for which unwed women sold their virtue

environmental policy compliance and innovation abstract this note provides an industrial organization perspective on the use of tradeable emissions permits in the context of so2 pollution in the usa and reports on some of our ongoing work on compliance and innovation in pollution abatement

a solution to the problem of externalities when agents are well informed the author describes a class of simple two stage mechanisms that implement efficient allocations as subgame perfect equilibria for economic environments involving externalities these mechanisms known as compensation mechanisms solve a wide variety of externalities problems including implementation of lindahl allocations regulation of monopoly and efficient solutions to the prisoner s dilemma copyright 1994 by american economic association

cost effective unilateral climate policy design size matters given the bleak prospects for a global agreement on mitigating climate change pressure for unilateral abatement is increasing a major challenge is emissions leakage border carbon adjustments and output based allocation of emissions allowances can increase effectiveness of unilateral action but introduce distortions of their own we assess antileakage measures as a function of abatement coalition size we first develop a partial equilibrium analytical framework to see how these instruments affect emissions within and outside the coalition we then employ a computable general equilibrium model of international trade and energy use to assess the strategies as the coalition grows we find that full border adjustments rank first in global cost effectiveness followed by import tariffs and output based rebates the differences across measures and their overall appeal decline as the abatement coalition grows in terms of cost the coalition countries prefer border carbon adjustments countries outside the coalition prefer output based rebates

the associations of soil fertility and market access with household income evidence from rural uganda abstract this study attempts to identify the major factors affecting farm and nonfarm income by using panel data of 894 rural households interviewed in 2003 and 2005 in rural uganda we supplement the panel data with household level soil fertility data and road distance data to the nearest urban center on three road types tarmac loose surface and dirt roads the results suggest that soil fertility measured by the soil organic matter som content is positively associated with crop income but not with livestock and nonfarm income we also find that the total road distance to the nearest urban center and the road quality have strong negative associations with the crop income

informing food security decisions in africa empirical analysis and policy dialogue discussions of economic and agricultural development in africa have focused heavily in recent years on structural adjustment i e basic policy changes aimed at allowing international and domestic markets to play a greater role in coordinating national economic activities often these structural adjustments and accompanying policies aimed at improving economic performance have been based on several implicit assumptions about how african food systems operate yet for many countries little empirical information has been available to test these assumptions hence designing policies too often becomes an exercise in planning without facts this paper argues that not only is there a need to base food security and structural adjustment policies more firmly on empirical information but that the process by which the information is obtained is as important as the information itself agricultural economists and other social scientists can and increasingly should design policy research in africa in ways that simultaneously increase effective demand for empirical information as an input into the ongoing policy process and augment african capacity continually to inform policy deliberations we illustrate the payoffs to such an approach by drawing on selected experience in several african countries weber

credible carbon policy the paper sets out the credibility problem in carbon policy provides a number of examples of non credibility in recent energy policy and identifies the costs of failing to address it the time inconsistency of carbon policy arising because of multiple objectives the irreversibility of energy investments and the scope for ex post reneging on ex ante commitments to set policy instruments such as carbon taxes or emission permits at appropriate levels is set in a conceptual framework analogies with monetary policy are drawn and a solution to the time inconsistency problem is proposed through the establishment of an energy carbon agency

interlinked markets and the cash crop food crop debate in land abundant tropical agriculture the purpose of this article is to illustrate how such institutions do arise in the african context under certain preconditions it is argued that the lack of a land market due largely to a non capitalist conception of property rights over land 3 along with other conditions to be examined below leads to the failure of labor and private sector credit markets in response indigenous institutions have evolved to cope with the market failures

credibility of optimal monetary delegation while optimal monetary policy is subject to a credibility problem it is often argued that the government should appoint a central banker whose incentives differ from the government s the author argues however that such delegation does not overcome credibility problems given that delegation is discretionary and without costs reappointment costs of delegation are shown to improve suboptimal outcomes but credibility of optimal monetary policy turns out be worsened at best delegation therefore has no effects on credibility but only if reappointment has no costs copyright 1997 by american economic association

recent progress of cooperation on climate mitigation a bibliometric analysis abstract effective international cooperation is an important measure to mitigate climate change the purpose of this study is to clarify the research progress in the field of cooperation on emission reduction identify the influential authors and articles and reveal the main research topics based on the bibliometric method and the web of science database this study analyzes the literature in the field of cooperation on emission reduction the results show that the publications in this field have increased significantly over the past decade with the usa and china are the most influential countries keyword co occurrence and frequency analysis show that the most important research topics are as follows burden sharing and equity the stability of the climate coalition and international environmental agreements technology transfer and climate finance the linkage of carbon markets and the response to noncooperation behavior the main methods involved are game theory model integrated assessment models and computable general equilibrium model equitable distribution of mitigation responsibilities is the basis for cooperation on carbon reduction specific rulebooks for carbon market linkage is the key to its successful implementation this study helps researchers to clarify the current research status in the field of cooperation on emission reduction and provide valuable information for future research

credibility of optimal monetary delegation comment in his recent paper in the american economic review jensen 1997 argues that delegation of monetary policy to an independent central bank which acts as an agent for the government does not mitigate the problem of time inconsistency but merely relocates it

principal challenges confronting smallholder agriculture in sub saharan africa summary this paper uses small scale farm survey data from five countries of eastern and southern africa to highlight four under appreciated issues i how land distribution patterns constrain the potential of crop technology and input intensification to enable many small farms to escape from poverty ii why most smallholders are unable to produce more than a marginal surplus or participate meaningfully in commodity markets iii why most farmers are directly hurt by higher grain prices and iv why the marketed agricultural surplus is exceedingly concentrated among a small group of relatively large smallholders policy and public investment options are reviewed in the light of these findings there is no one future for small farms in africa much depends on government policy and investment decisions

trigger price regulation we consider the difficulty of achieving efficient prices and investments when returns on a public utility s projects are vulnerable to opportunistic ratemaking we model the long term relationship between a firm and its regulator as a time dependent supergame in which the regulator sets price ceilings to maximize surplus and the firm invests to maximize profit we find history dependent strategies that support self enforcing mutually beneficial equilibria equilibrium payoffs are close to the planning solution provided interest rates are small enough and capital depreciates fast enough we concentrate on trigger price regulation where in response to inefficient behavior the regulator cuts price down to operating cost and the firm curtails investment this mechanism performs well even with production economies and with restrictions on players threats

two fallacies concerning central bank independence this paper takes issue with two basic conclusions prevalent in the literature on central bank behavior first the paper argues that it is inappropriate to presume that central banks will in the absence of any precommitment technology necessarily behave in a discretionary fashion that implies an inflationary bias since there is no functional connection between average rates of money creation or inflation and policy responsiveness to cyclical disturbances it is entirely feasible for the bias to be avoided in other words there is no necessary tradeoff between flexibility and commitment second to the extent that the absence of any absolute precommitment technology is nevertheless a problem it will apply to a consolidated central bank plus government entity as well as to the central bank alone thus contracts between governments and central banks do not overcome the motivation for dynamic inconsistency they merely relocate it this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

an analysis of out of wedlock childbearing in the united states this paper relates the erosion of the custom of shotgun marriage to the legalization of abortion and the increased availability of contraception to unmarried women in the united states the decline in shotgun marriage accounts for a significant fraction of the increase in out of wedlock first births several models illustrate the analogy between women who do not adopt either birth control or abortion and the hand loom weavers both victims of changing technology mechanisms causing female immiseration are modeled and historically described this technology shock hypothesis is an alternative to welfare and job shortage theories of the feminization of poverty excerpt

climate contracts a game of emissions investments negotiations and renegotiations the paper presents a dynamic game where players can contribute to a public bad invest in technologies and write incomplete contracts despite the n 1 stocks in the model the analysis is tractable and the symmetric markov perfect equilibrium unique the framework helps to analyze emissions investments and international environmental agreements if only the emission levels are contractible then investments are suboptimally small if the contract is short term or close to its expiration date to encourage investments the optimal contract is more ambitious if it is short term and it is tougher to satisfy close to its expiration date and for countries with small investment costs if renegotiation is possible such an incomplete contract implements the rst best the results have important lessons for how to design a climate treaty

optimal interest rate smoothing this paper considers the desirability of the observed tendency of central banks to adjust interest rates only gradually in response to changes in economic conditions it shows in the context of a simple model of optimizing private sector behaviour that assignment of an interest rate smoothing objective to the central bank may be desirable even when reduction of the magnitude of interest rate changes is not a social objective in itself this is because a response of policy to irrelevant lagged variables may be desirable owing to the way it steers private sector expectations of future policy

household specific food price differentials and high value crop production in rural ghana using panel data from ghana we have examined the relationship between household specific producer consumer price differentials and rural household cropland allocation between food and high value crops we test the hypothesis that cereal price bands induce a shift of resources away from high value crop production making smallholders appear unresponsive to price incentives our results lend support to this hypothesis implying that a policy aiming at increasing farmers income through high value crop production may fail if hard and soft infrastructure does not improve in rural areas and if staple crop productivity does not increase significantly

climate change policy market structure and carbon leakage abstract the 1997 kyoto protocol on climate change obliges the industrialized countries to initiate the international effort of abating anthropogenic greenhouse gas ghg emissions if such an initiative is to be taken the associated competitive effects may lead to significant relocation of developed countries energy intensive production this paper examines this issue i adopt an oligopolistic structure combined with increasing returns to scale production technologies to represent the strategic interaction among the firms producing energy intensive products this representation is then embedded within a multi regional computable general equilibrium model which in turn is used for quantifying these relocational effects the results suggest that significant relocation of energy intensive industries away from the oecd may occur depending on the type of market structure with leakage rates as high as 130 in which case ghg control policies in the industrialized countries actually lead to higher global emissions

stabilizing food markets in eastern and southern africa a major challenge for agricultural policy in africa is how to address the market instability related causes of low farm productivity and food insecurity this paper highlights structural changes affecting the behavior of food markets in eastern and southern africa and discusses their implications for the design of strategies to stabilize food prices these changes include 1 an increasing trend in maize prices toward import parity levels reflecting an emerging structural maize deficit in much of the region 2 increasingly diversified food consumption patterns in both rural and urban areas 3 highly concentrated marketed maize surplus which have largely unrecognized implications for the magnitude of price risk faced by most farm households and 4 the strategic interactions between private and public marketing actors leading in some cases to heightened market instability and food crises in the prevailing dual market environment now characterizing most of the region greater coordination transparency and consultation between private and public market actors is needed to achieve reasonable levels of food price stability and predictability

refunded emission payments theory distribution of costs and swedish experience of nox abatement in this paper we discuss the effect of refunding environmental charges taxes are often resisted by polluters because they imply both abatement and tax costs when charges are refunded the incentives for abatement are essentially the same as for a tax as long as there are many producers the incidence and distribution of costs is however different lower net tax payments reduce resistance from the polluters and make refunded emissions payments politically easier to implement at a sufficiently high charge level to have significant abatement effects we describe and examine the refunded emissions payment scheme as a policy instrument and compare it with taxes and permits with regard to allocative properties distribution of costs property rights and consequently the politics of implementation as an empirical example the swedish charge on nitrogen oxides is analyzed

optimal emission pricing in the presence of international spillovers decomposing leakage and terms of trade motives abstract carbon leakage provides an efficiency argument for differentiated emission prices in favor of emission intensive and trade exposed sectors under unilateral climate policy however differential emission pricing can be used as a beggar thy neighbor policy to exploit terms of trade adopting an optimal tax framework we propose a method to decompose the leakage and terms of trade motives for emission price differentiation we employ our method for the quantitative impact assessment of unilateral climate policy based on empirical data we find that the leakage motive yields only small efficiency gains compared to uniform emission pricing likewise the terms of trade motive has rather limited potential for strategic burden shifting we conclude that in many cases the simple first best rule of uniform emission pricing remains a practical guideline for unilateral climate policy design

marketable permits market power and cheating abstract in this paper we present a model of a noncompliant firm operating in a marketable pollution permit market in the main result of the paper we show how compliance is related to the initial distribution of permits a firm with market power will cheat less the larger its endowment of permits is from a fixed stock of permits the competitive fringe however will cheat more as its endowment of permits is reduced generating an ambiguous global impact on cheating

climate policy learning and technology adoption in small countries a significant reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions requires international cooperation in emission abatement as well as individual countries investment in the adoption of abatement technology the existing literature on climate policy pays insufficient attention to small countries which account for a substantial proportion of global emission in this study we investigate how climate policy and learning about climate damage affect investment in abatement technology in small countries we consider three alternative climate policy instruments emission standards harmonized taxes and auctioned permits we say that learning is feasible if an international environmental agreement iea is formed after the resolution of uncertainty about climate damage we find that either with learning and quadratic abatement costs or without learning harmonized taxes outperform emission standards and auctioned permits in terms of investment efficiency without learning a large cost of nonparticipation that a country incurs in the iea can be beneficial to the country whether learning improves investment efficiency depends on the size of this nonparticipation cost

international cooperation for sale abstract this paper shows that strong asymmetry among countries warrants a change in the rules of the game of global public goods provision with the consequence that cooperation by some countries is bought by others and aggregate welfare is increased perhaps substantially side payments on their own have virtually no effect on the outcomes that can be sustained by self enforcing cooperative agreements but when the rules of the game are changed by strong asymmetry when some countries are effectively committed to being non signatories to an agreement eschewing money transfers side payments become the vehicle for increasing participation in a cooperative agreement

welfare and the family the canadian experience canada has a universal social assistance program that is almost completely administered through the federal canada assistance program however provinces determine the levels of assistance for various groups eligible for welfare this article exploits the variation in payments and uses microdata to estimate the effect of changes in welfare benefits on welfare participation single parenthood births out of wedlock divorce and labor force participation among low income women in canada it would appear that welfare benefits influence these decisions

climate treaties and breakthrough technologies an effective climate change treaty must promote the joint supply of two global public goods climate change mitigation and knowledge of new technologies that can lower mitigation costs r d is especially needed to bring about substantial long term reductions in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases for this will require the development and diffusion of revolutionary breakthrough technologies martin i hoffert et al 2002 in principle such an outcome could be realized by the kyoto protocol approach if that agreement were strengthened over time however that response may be inadequate kyoto makes no provision for r d and as i shall demonstrate unlikely to succeed can a treaty system relying directly on targeted r d and the adoption of breakthrough technologies perform better in this same setting of anarchic international relations i will show that as a general rule the answer is no essentially the same forces that undermine kyoto also challenge the r d and technology approach there is one exception to this rule r d leading to breakthrough technologies exhibiting increasing returns can improve dramatically on the kyoto approach even when these technologies are otherwise inferior to the alternatives available this suggests that our approach to treaty design should be strategic

the dynamic efficiency of regulatory constitutions in this article we model regulation as a repeated game between a utility facing a random sequence of demands and a regulator tempted to underreward past investment rate of return regulation designed with a constitutional commitment to an adequate rate of return on capital prudently invested is able to support an efficient investment program as a subgame perfect nash equilibrium for a larger set of parameter values than rate of return regulation without such a commitment furthermore rate of return regulation is superior to price regulation according to the same criterion assuming that the regulator is unable to make state contingent transfer payments

comments on danzon maki murray and allen the two studies on disability by patricia danzon and dennis maki nicely complement each other danzon provides a very fine theoretical analysis of the effects of disability insurance while maki s is a good empirical study of the canadian experience why are governments so extensively involved in disability programs two very different explanations are 1 that governments offset failures in the private insurance market or 2 that government disability programs redistribute resources to some groups at the expense of others some analysts claim that private insurance markets do not work well because of the difficulties in handling self selection and moral hazard empirical studies in both the united states and canada typically find that public disability programs significantly reduce labor force participation rates for example maki finds that about a third of the reduction in participation rates of canadian males aged 45 64 in recent years is due to disability programs sizable effects are also found with u s data although danzon shows the large unexplained differences in estimates from different studies she states it is often implicitly assumed that all reduction in labor supply associated with disability insurance is moral hazard and entails an excess burden p s188 her theoretical analysis helps evaluate this implicit assumption for she shows that an optimal first best disability program might well reduce labor supply relative to a world with no insurance even when there is full information about disabilities indeed she shows more than this that under certain conditions with first best insurance the insuree is better off by suffering a disability than not insurees then have a strong incentive to fake disabilities it is not yet possible to evaluate how much of the reduction in labor supply in either canada or the united states is due to redistributive aspects

markets and regulatory hold up problems abstract many regulatory programs such as environmental regulation are effective only if firms make irreversible investments that reduce the cost of compliance a firm potentially subject to regulation may therefore behave strategically by not investing thereby forcing the regulator to void the proposed regulation we show that such incentives which resemble a hold up problem may not be overcome when government s only tool is the imposition of an emissions tax the hold up problem can be overcome by the issuance of tradeable permits a time consistent equilibrium exists with all firms investing and the government imposing regulations even if no permits are traded and their market price is low indeed an observation of no trade may indicate that pollution abatement is great

participation games and international environmental agreements a non parametric model abstract we examine the size of stable coalitions in a participation game that has been used to model international environmental agreements cartel formation rd based on these examples a consensus has emerged that in this kind of game the equilibrium coalition size is small except possibly when the potential benefits of cooperation are also small in this paper we develop a non parametric approach to the problem and demonstrate that the conventional wisdom is not robust in a general setting we identify conditions under which the equilibrium coalition size can be large even when potential gains are large contrary to previously examined leading special cases we show that reductions in marginal abatement costs in an international environmental game can increase equilibrium membership and we provide a measure of the smallest reduction in costs needed to support a coalition of arbitrary size

risk and household grain management in developing countries a dynamic model is presented of a household s joint production storage and trade decisions when facing transaction costs and risk in prices and yields grain management decisions balance the goals of maximising profits and reducing consumption price risk model solutions calibrated to chinese data show that grain s consumption role makes it an attractive form of precautionary saving even when households have access to credit the joint nature of production and savings decisions limits the income loss associated with risk coping and the desire to store grain can explain why subsistence households are frequently net purchasers but rarely net sellers of grain

international emission permit markets with refunding we propose a blueprint for an international emission permit market such as the eu trading scheme each country decides on the amount of permits it wants to offer a fraction of these permits is grandfathered the remainder is auctioned revenues from the auction are collected in a global fund and reimbursed to member countries in fixed proportions we show that international permit markets with refunding lead to outcomes in which all countries tighten the issuance of permits and are better off compared to standard international permit markets if the share of grandfathered permits is sufficiently small we obtain approximately socially optimal emission reductions

employment opportunities of young men and family formation major shifts in family patterns have limited progress toward reducing poverty and narrowing black white income differences much of the recent rise in female headship results from the rising number of never married mothers despite a decline in the proportion of unmarried young women having babies the drop in marriage rate has been so great that a rising proportion of children are under the care of never married mothers the absence of a parent dramatically increases current poverty of children and as sara mclanahan 1988 shows growing up in a poor family and in a mother headed family holding constant for income increases the chances that a child will become poor as an adult a long literature links the creation of mother headed families with the inadequate financial resources of men in 1965 the moynihan report attributed the then high rates of marital disruption among black families to the joblessness of black men but warned that family dissolution might have reached a self perpetuating stage unrelated to employment opportunities did the dramatic increases in one parent families after 1965 reflect such a new self generating pattern or were the job market problems of men the primary cause of the continuing decline in stable intact american families the most forceful recent proponent of the male job opportunity hypothesis hereafter mjo is sociologist william j wilson wilson 1987 argues that the declining number of employed black men relative to black women best explains the increasing proportions of black female headed families clifford johnson and andrew sum 1987 contend that declining real earnings of all young men was a major cause of their declining marriage rates this paper examines the mjo hypothesis with respect to young men and family formation marriage and becoming parents i begin by viewing the mjo hypothesis from the perspective of the economics of the family i then consider evidence from empirical studies of the mjo hypothesis the conclusion notes future policy and research direc

optimal taxation of capital income in general equilibrium with infinite lives this paper analyzes the optimal tax on capital income in general equilibrium models of the second best agents have infinite lives and utility functions which are extensions from the koopmans form the population is heterogeneous the important property of the models is the equality between the social and the private discount rates in the long run i find that the optimal tax rate is zero in the long run for a special case of additively separable utility functions i then determine the tax rates along the dynamic path and conditions that are sufficient for the local stability of the steady state

participation and duration of environmental agreements we analyze participation in international environmental agreements in a dynamic game in which countries pollute and invest in green technologies if complete contracts are feasible participants eliminate the holdup problem associated with their investments however most countries prefer to free ride rather than participate if investments are noncontractible countries face a holdup problem every time they negotiate but the free rider problem can be mitigated and significant participation is feasible participation becomes attractive because only large coalitions commit to long term agreements that circumvent the holdup problem under well specified conditions even the first best outcome is possible when the contract is incomplete

self enforcing environmental agreements and international trade abstract in the basic model of the literature on international environmental agreements ieas barrett 1994 rubio and ulph 2006 the number of signatories of self enforcing ieas does not exceed three if non positive emissions are ruled out we extend that model by introducing a composite consumer good and fossil fuel that are produced and consumed in each country and traded on world markets when signatory countries act as a stackelberg leader and emissions are positive the size of stable ieas may be significantly larger in our model with international trade this would be good news if larger self enforcing ieas would lead to stronger reductions of total emissions unfortunately in the presence of self enforcing ieas total emissions turn out to be only slightly less than in the business as usual scenario independent of the number of signatories we also investigate the role of international trade by comparing our free trade results with the outcome in the regime of autarky our autarky model turns out to be coincident with the basic model of the literature alluded to above we contribute to that literature by showing that in autarky the outcome of self enforcing ieas is also almost the same as in the business as usual scenario

are kenyan farmers under utilizing fertilizer implications for input intensification strategies and research abstract it is widely perceived that african farmers are under utilizing inorganic fertilizer however very little long term evidence from farmers fields accounting for variations in agro ecological conditions has been assembled to back this claim or determine the conditions under which it is true using five waves of nationwide household survey data from kenya covering 13 years we estimate the relative and absolute profitability of nitrogen application rates on maize fields and compare these profitability conditions to observed nitrogen use patterns over time in general we find that farmers are consistently and steadily increasing towards risk adjusted economically optimal rates of fertilizer application over time and that in the most agriculturally productive areas farmers application rates on maize sometimes exceed rates that maximize profitability fertilizer use rates may nevertheless be profitably raised in these areas but doing so will require the adoption of complementary inputs and management practices that raise maize response rates to fertilizer application this motivates a more holistic approach to input intensification strategies in the region

a regional dynamic general equilibrium model of alternative climate change strategies outcomes and noncooperative equilibria this study finds that cooperative policies show much higher levels of emissions reductions than do noncooperative strategies that there are substantial differences in the levels of controls in both the cooperative and the noncooperative policies among different countries and that high income countries may be the major losers from cooperation jel h41 q4 q2 q20

a tale of two market failures technology and environmental policy abstract market failures associated with environmental pollution interact with market failures associated with the innovation and diffusion of new technologies these combined market failures provide a strong rationale for a portfolio of public policies that foster emissions reduction as well as the development and adoption of environmentally beneficial technology both theory and empirical evidence suggest that the rate and direction of technological advance is influenced by market and regulatory incentives and can be cost effectively harnessed through the use of economic incentive based policy in the presence of weak or nonexistent environmental policies investments in the development and diffusion of new environmentally beneficial technologies are very likely to be less than would be socially desirable positive knowledge and adoption spillovers and information problems can further weaken innovation incentives while environmental technology policy is fraught with difficulties a long term view suggests a strategy of experimenting with policy approaches and systematically evaluating their success

the future of small farms new directions for services institutions and intermediation summary efficient pre and post harvest services are essential if small farms in high potential areas are to intensify production contribute to economic growth and reduce poverty they also matter if small farms in marginal areas are to manage their natural resource base in the face of growing population pressure and climate change difficulties that smallholders face in accessing services are reviewed showing how incentives for commercial delivery of services to smallholders differ between staple food traditional cash crop and high value product supply chains the major challenge in service delivery to smallholders in much of africa concerns coordination of service development and delivery different forms of intermediary institution for achieving such coordination are examined

observed choice estimation and optimism about policy changes a policy will be used more heavily in a time and place where its cost is lower the analyst who treats times and places as identical will overestimate the policy s net bene t especially for policy intensities greater than exist in his sample in regression analysis the problem can be solved by weighted instrumental variables using state level data the technique substantially increases the estimated responsiveness of illegitimacy to transfers indiana university school of business rm 456 1309 e 10th street bloomington indiana 47405 1701 o ce 812 855 9219 fax 812 855 3354 email erasmuse indiana edu jel numbers and

robust policies to mitigate carbon leakage abstract unilateral climate policy induces carbon leakage through the relocation of emission intensive and trade exposed industries to regions without emission regulation previous studies suggest that emission pricing combined with border carbon adjustment is a second best instrument and more cost effective than output based rebating we show that the combination of output based rebating and a consumption tax for emission intensive and trade exposed goods can be equivalent with border carbon adjustment moreover it is welfare improving for a region that implements emission pricing along with output based rebating to introduce such a consumption tax the welfare gain is particularly large if output based rebating is already implemented for a sector that is not much exposed to leakage e g due to uncertainty about exposure or due to lobbying activities thus supplementing output based rebating with a consumption tax constitutes robust policies to mitigate carbon leakage

welfare marital prospects and nonmarital childbearing the roles of the entitlements of the afdc program and marital prospects in the fertility and marriage choices of young women are assessed in the context of a model incorporating heritable endowment heterogeneity assortative mating concern for child quality and potential parental and public support alternatives estimates based on data describing the fertility and marital experience up to age 23 of the eight birth cohorts of women in the nlsy provide evidence that higher afdc benefit levels and lower marital prospects induce young women to choose to have a child outside of marriage

afdc participation across generations william julius wilson s influential book the truly disadvantaged 1987 has sparked a vigorous debate about the existence and causes of an urban underclass while there is still no clear agreement about definitions the growing literature on the underclass focuses both on traits of the current generation and the traits of their parents if an underclass exists its current members are assumed to live in deteriorating inner cities to experience long spells of joblessness or welfare dependency and or to engage in illegal and antisocial activities furthermore these traits are assumed to be correlated across generations leading to a cycle of deprivation in this paper i focus on one such link across generations by examining the correlation in welfare participation of daughters and their parents i first present the state of knowledge about the extent to which children of parents who received aid to families with dependent children afdc are themselves more likely to participate in this welfare program second i discuss the remaining gaps in our understanding and give several contrasting altemative explanations for the observed correlation each with a different policy implication