are household production decisions cooperative evidence on pastoral migration and milk sales from northern kenya market based development efforts frequently create opportunities to generate income from goods previously produced and consumed within the household production within the household is often characterized by a gender and age division of labor market development efforts to improve wellbeing may lead to unanticipated outcomes if household production decisions are noncooperative we develop and test models of household decision making to investigate intrahousehold decision making in a nomadic pastoral setting from kenya our results suggest that household decisions are contested with husbands using migration decisions to resist wives ability to market milk

women s access to credit does it matter for household efficiency studies that assess the impact of credit constraints on farm households efficiency have largely used the household as the unit of analysis this can be problematic when there are gender based market imperfections and asymmetries in how rights resources and responsibilities are distributed within the household constraints on women matter in addition to the efficiency loss associated with the husbands credit constraints when women are unable to meet their needs for capital their households experienced an additional 11 drop in efficiency this suggests that there are efficiency based arguments for enhancing women s access to capital and that studies based only on the household s head may significantly underestimate the true economic impact of credit constraints copyright 2008 oxford university press

the impact of agricultural and household technologies on women a conceptual and quantitative analysis in burkina faso abstract agricultural technologies new cultivars inorganic fertilizers soil and water conservation techniques in sub saharan africa have been primarily introduced to male farmers by male dominated extension services on the family plots these yield increasing input intensive technologies increase the demand for farm labor so not only do men obtain most of the direct benefits from the introduction of technology but this labor intensive technology also increases the demands on women s time for additional labor this raises the question are the combined effects of agricultural technologies beneficial or detrimental to women we first develop a labor market model that examines the impact of agricultural and household technologies on labor allocation and income determination within the household we then discuss the important issue of how household labor allocation decisions and division of income are made within the family in sub saharan africa we use a programming model to estimate the effects of these technologies on household incomes and the income of women the results indicate that the impact of agricultural technologies depends on the type of decision making prevailing in the household in contrast household technologies increase the welfare of women regardless of the type of decision making however with bargaining behavior agricultural technologies do benefit women and there is some empirical support for this type of household behavior in sub saharan african households

to elect or to appoint bias information and responsiveness of bureaucrats and politicians in this paper we address empirically the trade offs involved in choosing between bureaucrats and politicians in order to do this we map institutions of selection and retention of public officials to the type of public officials they induce we do this by specifying a collective decision making model and exploiting its equilibrium information to obtain estimates of the unobservable types we focus on criminal decisions across us states supreme courts we find that justices that are shielded from voters influence bureaucrats on average i have better information ii are more likely to change their preconceived opinions about a case and iii are more effective make less mistakes than their elected counterparts politicians we evaluate how performance would change if the courts replaced majority rule with unanimity rule

empirical evidence on the relation between stock option compensation and risk taking abstract we examine whether executive stock options esos provide managers with incentives to invest in risky projects for a sample of oil and gas producers we examine whether the coefficient of variation of future cash flows from exploration activity our proxy for exploration risk increases with the sensitivity of the value of the ceo s options to stock return volatility eso risk incentives both eso risk incentives and exploration risk are treated as endogenous variables by adopting a simultaneous equations approach we find evidence that eso risk incentives has a positive relation with future exploration risk taking additional tests indicate that eso risk incentives exhibits a negative relation with oil price hedging in a system of equations where eso risk incentives and hedging are allowed to be endogenously determined overall our results are consistent with esos providing managers with incentives to mitigate risk related incentive problems

the impact of development on women a specific factors analysis abstract the specific factors model is employed in this paper as a means of explaining how economic development may serve to diminish women s welfare three changes associated with the development process are analyzed for their effect on women s real and relative wage 1 an expansion of trade induced by an improvement in the terms of trade 2 technological change and 3 an increase in female labor force participation

are tenured judges insulated from political pressure tenured public officials such as judges are often thought to be insulated from political pressure and as a result indifferent to the concerns of the electorate we investigate this proposition empirically using data on promotion decisions taken by senior english judges between 1985 and 2005 throughout this period the popular view was one of ill disciplined elitism senior judges were alleged to be favouring candidates from elite backgrounds over their equally capable non elite counterparts we find evidence in support of this view to be surprisingly weak most of the unconditional difference in promotion prospects between the two groups can simply be explained by differences in promotion relevant characteristics we then exploit an unexpected proposal to remove control over promotions from the judiciary and find that judges behaviour dramatically changed when faced by the prospect of losing autonomy senior judges began to favour non elite candidates as well as candidates who were unconnected to members of the promotion committee

control and ownership of assets within rural ethiopian households this article investigates how the control and devolution of productive assets are allocated among husband and wife theory predicts that bargaining power within marriage depends on the division of assets upon divorce and on control over assets during marriage using detailed household data from rural ethiopia we show that assets brought to marriage ownership of assets control within marriage and disposition upon death or divorce are only partly related productive resources are controlled by the household head disposition upon death or divorce only loosely depends on individual ownership during marriage but control is associated with larger claims upon divorce assets brought into marriage have little impact on disposition upon death but matter in case of divorce

hearts and spades paradigms of household economics abstract this paper explains why the feminist critique of inequalities within the family poses a serious challenge to conventional economic theories of the household but it also discusses those aspects of both neoclassical and marxian theory that are useful to an analysis of conflict within the family arguing that the bargaining power models being developed by some neoclassical theorist are complementary to marxist influenced structural accounts

gender disparity in access to information do spouses share what they know summary the united nations un has declared lack of access to information to be the third major challenge confronting women in developing countries after poverty and violence analyzing a unique dataset of husbands and wives in rural paraguay we identify systematic differences between women and men s knowledge of financial markets and find that the factors that help predict individuals knowledge of these markets vary by gender specifically women are less likely than men to be informed about the financial institutions operating in their communities women are more likely to know what is required to obtain loans from financial institutions if they are more educated live with other adult women belong to wealthier households are in a stronger bargaining position vis a vis their spouses or have their husbands approval to take out entrepreneurial loans

information polarization and term length in democracy abstract this paper considers term lengths in a representative democracy where the political issue divides the population on the left right scale parties are ideologically different and better informed about the consequences of policies than voters are a short term length makes the government more accountable but the re election incentive leads to policy distortion as the government seeks to manipulate swing voters beliefs to make its ideology more popular this creates a trade off a short term length improves accountability but gives distortions a short term length is best for swing voters when the uncertainty is large and parties are not very polarized partisan voters always prefer a long term length when politicians learn while in office a long term length becomes more attractive for swing voters

formally modelling a gender segregated economy a response to william darity jr abstract william darity jr s model presented in the november 1995 issue of world development darity 1995 is an important attempt to provide an outline for gender based analysis at the household level the model falls short however because it focuses on income maximization without specific constraints on the man s time this paper demonstrates that as formulated there is no internal maximization solution possible and then offers additional economic information that would be meaningful and appropriate to make darky s model well specified

determinants of the intrahousehold allocation of food in the rural philippines this study shows that the opportunity cost of time for husbands and wives can affect the intrahousehold distribution of food in a developing country equations which explain the relative allocation of calories within households were estimated for husbands wives and children with data for the rural philippines the estimating equation is derivable from both a joint household utility function and a bargaining model because the same households were included in the four survey rounds the various observations for a given individual were averaged for each variable in the estimation procedure wages were estimated using the heckman approach

addressing food security in africa via multiple livelihood strategies of women farmers abstract because food insecurity is primarily a problem of low household incomes and poverty and not just inadequate food production projects and programs for food insecure african farmers which aim at increasing production of subsistence crops may be ineffective instead government should look for ways to improve returns to farmers resources in a broader context which may include expanded opportunities for non farm microenterprises and agricultural labor this has been the conventional wisdom since the writings of amartya sen still unclear however are the implications of his thinking for the roles of african women farmers who are traditionally the food crop producers in africa and are often food insecure immediate expansion of income earning activities such as cash cropping and non farm microenterprises may not be possible for women in male headed households in many african societies where cash income is seen as part of the male domain in addition women farmers may need a long adjustment period to diversify their income sources fully because most african countries are at the early stages of structural transformation different developmental interventions both in policy and in technology are therefore needed to address food security and economic transformations in africa in the short and long term

haddad lawrence john hoddinott and harold alderman eds intrahousehold resource allocation in developing countries models methods and policy baltimore md johns hopkins university press 1997 384 pp 55 00 in this volume economists demographers sociologists and anthropologists collaborate in the study of how resources are allocated within households in developing countries and why it matters from a policy perspective surveying a broad range of theory and evidence the contributors examine the many social and cultural factors that influence decisions about the family and household level about the allocation of time income assets and other resources ths contributors show that a more complete understanding of intrahousehold behaviour can increase the likelihood that policies will reach the people they are intended to affect

can agricultural input subsidies reduce the gender gap in modern maize adoption evidence from malawi abstract nationally representative data for malawi were used to measure the gender gap in adoption of modern maize and to investigate how if at all malawi s farm input subsidy program fisp has impacted the gap regression results show the probability of adopting modern maize was 12 lower for wives in male headed households and 11 lower for female household heads than for male farmers receipt of subsidized input coupons had no discernible effect on modern maize adoption for male farmers receiving a subsidy for both seed and fertilizer increased the probability of modern maize cultivation by 222 for female household heads suggesting the fisp has likely reduced the gender gap in adoption of modern maize in malawi

flypaper effects in transfers targeted to women evidence from brac s targeting the ultra poor program in bangladesh abstract many development interventions target transfers to women however little evidence directly explores the flypaper effects of whether women retain control over these transfers once within the household and how reallocation of the transfers affects women s empowerment we study these dynamics in the context of brac s randomized cfpr tup program in bangladesh which provides livestock and training to rural women in ultra poor households our analysis confirms previous findings that cfpr tup increased household asset ownership but shows complex effects on targeted women women appear to retain ownership over transferred livestock but new investments from mobilized resources are largely owned by men cfpr tup also reduces women s movement outside the home and control over income consistent with transferred livestock requiring maintenance at home however beneficiary women also report intangible benefits such as increased social capital and even with limited mobility a preference for work inside the home given a hostile environment outside the home

are emily and greg more employable than lakisha and jamal a field experiment on labor market discrimination we study race in the labor market by sending fictitious resumes to help wanted ads in boston and chicago newspapers to manipulate perceived race resumes are randomly assigned african american or white sounding names white names receive 50 percent more callbacks for interviews callbacks are also more responsive to resume quality for white names than for african american ones the racial gap is uniform across occupation industry and employer size we also find little evidence that employers are inferring social class from the names differential treatment by race still appears to still be prominent in the u s labor market jel j71 j64

the effect of the value of time on food consumption patterns in developing countries evidence from sri lanka this study shows that the opportunity cost of women s time can affect household food consumption patterns in developing countries demand equations for rice bread and the ratio of bread to total cereal consumption are estimated for urban sri lankan households the demand specification which is based on the new household economics includes as explanatory variables the woman s estimated market wage and the household s full income and alternatively observed income wages are estimated using the heckman procedure to correct for sample selection bias

price policy poverty and power within rural west african households abstract this paper explores the impact of agricultural price policy on poverty in west africa a region in which prices are an important tool for raising rural household incomes a game theoretic collective model of household income generation and resource allocation is developed that incorporates three features typical of west african rural households preference heterogeneity among women and men individual resource control and power mediated bargaining over resource control in the face of changes in households economic environments to explore price effects the model is used to simulate the income impacts of large increases in cotton prices accompanying fast paced agricultural liberalisation in burkina faso in the 1980s the paper shows that where resources are controlled individually by household members rather than pooled pareto efficiency in income generation does not hold the impact of agricultural price policy on poverty is mediated by bargaining over resource control within households bo

commercialization and the balance of women s dual roles in non income pooling west african households barked on structural adjustment programs of which agricultural liberalization has been a major component as previously depressed farmgate prices are allowed to rise increasing incentives for farm households to produce marketed crops such liberalization has the side effect of accelerating commercialization through raising households real incomes it is expected to improve rural peoples physical well being both women and men in west african farm

the sensitivity of ceo wealth to equity risk an analysis of the magnitude and determinants abstract to control risk related incentive problems equity holders are expected to manage both the convexity and slope of the relation between firm performance and managers wealth i find stock options but not common stockholdings significantly increase the sensitivity of ceos wealth to equity risk cross sectionally this sensitivity is positively related to firms investment opportunities this result is consistent with managers receiving incentives to invest in risky projects when the potential loss from underinvestment in valuable risk increasing projects is greatest firms stock return volatility is positively related to the convexity provided to managers suggesting convex incentive schemes influence investing and financing decisions

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

civil service reform abstract civil service rules governing the selection and motivation of bureaucrats are among the defining institutions of modern democracies although this is an active area of reform in the us and elsewhere economic analyses of the issue are virtually nonexistent this paper provides a welfare evaluation of civil service reform it describes the effect of reform on the interaction of politicians voters and bureaucrats and shows that society often faces trade offs between improving the bureaucracy and improving the performance of politicians my results characterize the conditions under which merit based recruitment and civil service protections such as tenure can improve welfare

incumbent performance and electoral control in the pure theory of electoral competition citizens compare the platforms of the candidates and vote for the one whose platform is preferred candidate strategies are identified with promises about future performance in office models of this sort have been developed in both static mckelvey 1975 and dynamic kramer 1977 i settings and all appear to have the property that if the set of alternatives is large enough in some sense equilibrium platforms rarely exist but these models have another feature that is quite as disturbing as their instability in the static setting discussed by mckelvey little attention is paid to the possibility that once in office the politician s preferences may diverge from those of his constituents and that he may therefore choose policies at variance from his platform instead it is simply assumed that promises will be kept whether or not such behavior is congruent with the interest of the officeholder it is sometimes argued that an enforcement mechanism may exist to discipline politicians for failing to keep promises but without a specification of the mechanism it is not obvious that it would be in the interests of the

can gender parity break the glass ceiling evidence from a repeated randomized experiment this paper studies whether the gender composition of recruiting committees matters we make use of the unique evidence provided by spanish public examinations where the allocation of candidates to evaluating committees is random we analyse how the chances of success of 150 000 female and male candidates for positions in the four main corps of the spanish judiciary from 1987 to 2007 were affected by the gender composition of their evaluation committee we find that a female male candidate is significantly less likely to be hired whenever she he is randomly assigned to a committee where the share of female male evaluators is relatively greater evidence from multiple choice tests suggests that this is due to the fact that female majority committees overestimate the quality of male candidates

do spouses realise cooperative gains experimental evidence from rural uganda summary we use experimental data from variants of public good games to test for household efficiency among married couples in rural uganda spouses frequently do not maximise surplus from cooperation and perform better when women are in charge of allocating the common pool women contribute less to this household common pool than men and opportunism is widespread these results cast doubts on many models of household decision making experimental results are correlated with socio economic attributes and suggest that assortative matching improves household efficiency developing non cooperative household models sensitive to the context specificity of gender relations emerges as a promising future research agenda

why financial structure matters the 1958 paper by franco modigliani and merton miller has been justly hailed as a landmark in the modern theory of finance what has not been sufficiently emphasized is the importance of the paper to the development of economic theory and practice indeed it is ironic that a paper which purportedly established that one need not pay any attention to financial structure that financial structure was irrelevant should have focused economists attention on finance merton miller gives what must be part of the explanation in his preceding paper in this issue by providing conditions where financial policy was irrelevant conditions which were close to the assumptions used by most conventional economists the paper forced a reexamination of those standard assumptions that reexamination is still going on the mm results have such great intellectual power and appeal that their direct effect has sometimes been to lead economists astray this result may perhaps be seen most forcefully in the work in investment theory in the major study done prior to mm that of meyer and kuh 1959 financial variables like profitability were identified as having important independent effects on investment but the paradigm that became dominant following the publication of mm most forcefully articulated by dale jorgenson and his associates argues that in the absence of taxation financial structure for instance the magnitude of the firm s equity base or cash fiow would make no difference to the level of investment theory drove the econometrics financial structure variables were excluded because economic theory that is modigliani and miller said they should be excluded only recently as a developing and substantial body of economic theory says once again that such variables should be included have econometricians included profit variables again in their specifications

women and structural transformation development is at a relatively early stage 2 analysis of women s role as economic actors as distinct from being part of the labor force in general is still rudimentary 3 the extent to which and the conditions under which gender may influence a variety of economic outcomes are not well researched the nature and the extent of segmentation of economic activity between males and females and their changing roles in different socioeconomic settings and during the course of economic development are inadequately investigated in economic literature 4 consequently whether the efficiency and welfare losses from women s low participation in economic activity are significant in static and dynamic contexts is inadequately articulated much of the research on women in developed countries has been in a comparative static context 5 the changes in incomes technology demography and tastes with regard to women s roles however are not only much more rapid but also simultaneous in developing countries making research in a comparative static context of relatively little value the implications of the dynamic factors are analytically complex to handle but are critical for public policy even where policy implications are obvious from the existing limited research however these have not always been effectively incorporated by governments in their actions this article first summarizes the major themes of the various types

wages for wives renegotiating gender and production relations in contract farming in the dominican republic abstract this study analyzes the intersection of gender and production relations in small scale contracting in nontraditional agriculture the case of the processing tomato industry in the dominican republic exemplifies patterns found throughout the region building on a critique of unitary household models i analyze the gendered relations mobilizing resources for contract farming as appears common contracting has heightened demand for women s farm labor contracting has simultaneously provided women with openings for contesting the appropriation of their unpaid labor and many women are claiming payment for work in contract farming this case demonstrates the importance of gender issues in informing contract farming debates and policy interventions

welfare impacts of technological change on women in southern mali abstract it has often been hypothesized that new agricultural technologies could have an adverse impact on women because additional labor required of them reduces the time spent and therefore income earned from private field activities this study shows that the expansion of cotton cultivation on the household communal fields in southern mali associated with the introduction of new technologies results in increased payments to women for their increased labor on the cotton fields unfortunately these payments are small compared to the loss of revenue from private plot production thus the net effect of the expansion of household cotton cultivation is a reduction in incomes of women who cultivate private plots short run policy implications of this study are that improving women s income requires concern with their private plot earnings for example profitability of the private field crops could be increased with higher input use in the long run as land becomes even more constrained emphasis needs to be placed on institutional changes to increase women s bargaining power so that they obtain larger shares of the new income streams resulting from technological change on the communal field institutional changes already occurring in the region with the apparent objective of increasing women s and non household head men s bargaining power include organized work teams and the movement toward smaller nuclear families

gender agricultural production and the theory of the household virtually all models of the household assume that the allocation of resources is pareto efficient within many african households agricultural production occurs on many plots controlled by different members of the household pareto efficiency implies that factors should be allocated efficiently across these plots i find in contrast that plots controlled by women are farmed much less intensively than similar plots within the household controlled by men the estimates imply that about 6 percent of output is lost because of inefficient factor allocation within the household the paper suggests a new approach to modeling intrahousehold allocation consistent with the empirical results

effects of technological change in agriculture on food consumption and nutrition rice in a west african setting abstract this paper traces the effects of technological change in agriculture to production and income effects and to consumption and nutritional effects the study environment is west africa the gambia the technological change considered is various new modes of rice production versus traditional rice production main findings of this empirical analysis are the following 1 it cannot be assumed that by focusing investment on a woman s crop one helps women farmers the more a new technology increased labor productivity in rice the more there was a takeover of the rice production technology by male producers and the more the crop became a communal crop for household food security household income increased substantially 2 much of the increased income is spent on increased calorie consumption it makes no difference for the degree of change in calorie consumption levels if change in real income is in the form of cash or subsistence food 3 technological change effects mediated through income are traced to increased food consumption calories at the household level where it is found to significantly improve children s nutritional status especially in the rainy season

household bargaining power and agricultural supply response evidence from ethiopian coffee growers summary this paper investigates whether preference heterogeneity between spouses contributes to limited cash crop production in southern ethiopia using the value of livestock each spouse would take in the event of divorce as a measure of bargaining power this paper shows a significant negative correlation between the bargaining power proxies and coffee output livestock ownership during marriage does not have a significant impact on coffee production in contrast to the case in commercial production women s exit options have a weak positive effect on production of the staple crop enset

bureaucrats or politicians part i a single policy task this paper investigates the normative criteria that guide the allocation of a policy task to an elected politician versus an independent bureaucrat the bureaucrat is preferable for technical tasks for which ability is more important than effort or if there is great uncertainty about whether the policymaker has the required abilities the optimal allocation of redistributive tasks is ambiguous and depends on how the bureaucrat can be instructed but irrespective of the normative conclusion the politician prefers not to delegate redistributive policies

the cost of capital and optimal financing policy in a dynamic setting abstract this paper revisits the modigliani miller propositions on the optimal financing policy and cost of capital in a dynamic setting in an environment without taxes and bankruptcy costs the results are generally consistent with the modigliani miller propositions 1 and 2 however the first proposition should be presented and interpreted more carefully as given firm characteristics there is only one optimal capital structure thus a firm s capital structure is relevant a relaxation of assumptions about either taxes or bankruptcy costs leads to conclusions that are generally different from those in modigliani and miller 1958 the model predicts that leverage and sales to capital ratios decrease but firm size and capital stock increase with the subjective discount factor of the firm s manager if there are taxes and bankruptcy costs the empirical analysis supports these predictions

preference heterogeneity power and intrahousehold decision making in rural malaysia abstract this paper examines conjugal household responsibilities roles preference heterogeneity and intrahousehold power relations in rural malay families its three major contributions are to provide an effective initial indicator of separate spheres within the family develop and implement a method for measuring the extent of conjugal preference heterogeneity and illustrate the value of combining this direct measure of preference heterogeneity with a measure of power in estimating household expenditure patterns for three major items food schooling and housing improvement these three measurement innovations applied to the rural malaysia context demonstrate the potential for more direct efforts to model and measure intrahousehold decisions

gender property rights and natural resources abstract attention to gender differences in property rights can improve the outcomes of natural resource management policies and projects in terms of efficiency environmental sustainability equity and empowerment of resource users although it is impossible to generalize across cultures and resources it is important to identify the nature of rights to land trees and water held by women and men and how they are acquired and transmitted from one user to another the paper particularly examines how the shift from customary tenure systems to private property in land trees and water has affected women the effect of gender differences in property on collective action and the implications for project design

testing among models of intrahousehold resource allocation households are the locus for much economic decision making households function as producers investors in human and physical capital managers of risk and as consumers many resources are allocated within households and the effects of many policies depend on the dynamics of household decision making for example household decisions about allocating food among individual household members may determine who benefits from programs to improve health nutrition or welfare in many microeconomic studies the household is treated as an individual for analytical purposes in other words it is assumed that a household acts as a single entity with a single set of preferences recently however a number of economists have recognized that households are sites of conflict as well as cooperation and have begun to use new classes of models to explain how resources are allocated among household members this literature has especially improved our understanding of households in which income is not completely pooled in such a setting standard household models may offer misleading conclusions about the effects of policies on individual household members i this paper goes beyond recent surveys of intrahousehold issue by explicitly examining the assumptions predictions and empirical implications of different intrahousehold models in particular it analyzes empirical tests that distinguish among competing models by clarifying the similarities and differences among alternative models this paper also clarifies what has actually been demonstrated and what has not been demonstrated by previous empirical studies in so doing the paper points to specific topics in need of further research this paper is organized as follows section 2 analyzes the assumptions and predictions of each of the five main classes of intrahousehold resource allocation models section 3 describes empirical tests of these assumptions along with an analysis of empirical work that has been generated sections 4 and 5 discuss the questions that remain unanswered and directions for future research

is a turnaround in africa possible without helping african women to farm a turnaround in africa is not possible in the short run of at least 1 decade without helping women farmers with hand hoes gain equal access to basic agricultural inputs and resources this is so because women are such active participants in farming it is estimated that for 82 countries women constitute 46 of the agricultural labor force in sub saharan africa and 31 of the force in north africa and the middle east in the long run however a turnaround is possible without helping women to farm because women farmers will be displaced as agricultural intensification occurs but because the intensification process will be extremely uneven both within and between african countries the displacement of women farmers will also be uneven thus their displacement will be blocked or slowed down in regions with sufficient land resources and land extensive family systems extensive male out migration lack of control of animal diseases or the presence of gender neutral incentives to produce in conclusion women farmers in these regions will still be the norm while those in other regions will be displaced as intensification required by a turnaround proceeds to insure that women farmers are not displaced policy planners at international national and local levels should communicate with technical experts and extension specialists about the need to incorporate women as agricultural producers with full access to yield increasing inputs in development projects

accelerating food production in sub saharan africa in 1982 26 countries in africa faced acute food shortages and nutrition problems during the 1960s the continents food production per person fell 7 and during the 1970s it fell an additional 15 in only 8 countries which account for less than 15 of the regions population did per capita agricultural production actually increase in the 1970s in view of the expectation that the urban population will quadruple during the last quarter of this century present trends are intolerable and must be reversed another disturbing problem that needs urgent attention is the rapid depletion of vital topsoil estimated by the director general of the un food and agriculture organization to be a frightening 6 million hectares per annum this volume provides up to date definitions of the food and nutrition problems that face africa now and in the medium term future the book also deals with the policy needs for promoting growth of food production the concept of solving our food shortages by increasing production is the policy of the southern african development coordination conference sadcc the book also examines food policy in the context of national development strategies though potentially rich sub saharan africa is at present extremely poor in 1979 per capita gross national product gnp in the whole area was only 411 compare this with a gnp per capita of 9440 in the countries of the industrialized world the demand for improved living standards presses from virtually every quarter while available resources are extremely limited without exception each country of the region faces the problem of determining food policy in the context of its overall national development strategy several chapters in this volume by representatives from both sub saharan africa and donor countries and agencies analyze past experiences and suggest aid strategies for accelerating agricultural growth in the region several stress the point that the aid most urgently required is that which would assist our region in greater utilization of its agricultural base in order to increase overall production and lessen dependence on food aid

a century long perspective on agricultural development this article strategically surveys the past century s literature on agricultural development we organize the discussion around three grand themes that reveal the richness of agricultural development as an intellectual endeavor first we explore the role of agriculture in the broader development process from a macroeconomic and political economy perspective we then examine the role of technological and institutional change in successful agricultural development finally the focus turns to a microeconomic perspective on agricultural household decision making and the problems of imperfect and missing markets asymmetric information and transactions costs that lead to widespread apparent inefficiency and disequilibrium

racial discrimination among nba referees the nba provides an intriguing place to assess discrimination referees and players are involved in repeated interactions in a high pressure setting with referees making split second decisions that might allow implicit racial biases to become evident we find that more personal fouls are awarded against players when they are officiated by an opposite race officiating crew than when they are officiated by an own race refereeing crew these biases are sufficiently large so that they affect the outcome of an appreciable number of games our results do not distinguish whether the bias stems from the actions of white or black referees

the capital structure puzzle revisited corporate finance researchers have long been puzzled by low corporate debt ratios given debt s corporate tax advantage this article recognizes that firm value typically reflects a growing stream of earnings while current debt reflects a nongrowing stream of interest payments debt to value is therefore a distorted measure of corporate tax shielding even with very small debt related costs this may explain the observed magnitude and cross sectional variation of debt ratios since this variation may be independent of tax shielding debt ratios provide an inappropriate framework for empirically examining the trade off theory of capital structure article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

the mobilization of women s labor for cash crop production a game theoretic approach in the last decade or so economists have modeled phenomena such as household labor supply fertility behavior and child survival rates using the household as the unit of analysis this paper presents data that call into question the assumption that the household is a joint decision making unit which maximizes a neoclassical household utility function the data come from a study of the mobilization of women s labor by their husbands for irrigated rice production in north cameroon the first section of this paper describes briefly the massa rice and sorghum farming system and then considers the relationship between the amount of compensation women receive from their husbands for their labor on rice production and the amount of labor they allocate to rice production the findings suggest that a bargaining model may describe the intrahousehold relations of production and distribution better than the neoclassical model the second section specifies a nash bargaining model and contrasts it with the neoclassical model of the household using the bargaining framework the third section explores in more detail possible explanations of the allocative inefficiency which seems to characterize many of the rice cultivating households

a political agency theory of central bank independence we propose a theory to explain why and under what circumstances a politician endogenously gives up rent and delegates policy tasks to an independent agency we apply this theory to mon etary policy by extending a stochastic general equilibrium model this model provides a theory of central bank independence that is unrelated to the standard time inconsistency problem which underlies all formalized theories of central bank independence we derive five key predictions of the model and show that they are broadly consistent with the data finally we show that while instrument independence of the central bank is desirable goal independence is not

collective action within the household insights from natural resource management summary households face many collective action situations with members working together to produce livelihoods and allocate goods but neither unitary nor bargaining models of the household provide frameworks to analyze the conditions under which households work collectively and when they fail to do so drawing on the institutional analysis and development framework based in the natural resource management literature this paper explores the factors that encourage and inhibit collective action and provides insights into how to understand collective action problems within the household as dynamic multi actor situations with outcomes that can be evaluated by multiple criteria not just efficiency

household behaviour and nutrition in developing countries abstract this article reviews some of the recent major research findings concerning the effect of household behaviour on food consumption and nutrition important extensions to the understanding of household behaviour have been made in the areas of the impact of income and price changes agricultural households the effects of agricultural commercialization the new household economics and particularly the effect of time as a scarce economic resource the intrahousehold allocation of food and the determinants of nutritional status this knowledge is important because the response by households affects the final impact of economic changes and government actions on the nutritional status of the population

the empirical content of nash bargained household behavior in households whose allocation decisions can be represented as nash bargained household decisions extrahousehold environmental parameters eeps serve as pure shifters of the threat points the comparative statics of changes in demands due to changes in these eeps are given these are incorporated into a comprehensive statement of the empirical content of nash bargained household behavior including a nash generalization of barten s 1966 fundamental matrix equation of the theory of consumer demand estimation and data requirements are discussed along with nested testing of the following structure the neoclassical model is nested in the nash bargained model which in turn is nested in an unrestricted model of household demands emphasized throughout is the enriched menu of explanatory variables for demand analysis provided by the nash model as well as the model s ability to jointly analyze i household formation and ii intrahousehold allocation decisions

male female wage differentials in job ladders much of the male female wage differential exists because men and women are assigned to different jobs within narrow job categories there is no male female differential only a tortured taste theory of discrimination can reconcile these facts we argue that differential movement along job ladders entails comparative advantage so the ability standard for promotion is higher for women this implies that more able women will be passed over in favor of less able men women assumed to have the same ability distribution as men earn less the differential reflects females lower promotion probability not within job discrimination

using tax return data to simulate corporate marginal tax rates abstract we document that simulated corporate marginal tax rates based on financial statement data shevlin t 1990 estimating corporate marginal tax rates with asymmetric tax treatment of gains and losses the journal of the american taxation association 11 51 67 graham j 1996a debt and the marginal tax rate journal of financial economics 41 41 73 are highly correlated with simulated rates based on corporate tax return data we provide algorithms that can be used to estimate the book or tax simulated rates when they are not available we find that the simulated book marginal tax rate does a better job of explaining financial statement debt ratios than does the analogous tax return variable and discuss how the book simulated rate is likely to be an appropriate measure in settings with global long term considerations

household production reconsidered gender labor conflict and technological change in malaysia s muda region abstract the notion of the farm household as a bounded unit of production and consumption has become enshrined as a category of analysis and as a policy ideal this article points to the limitations of the neoclassical theory of the farm household for understanding technological and economic change and suggests an alternative politicized approach that focuses on gender relations within and among households evidence to illustrate these arguments comes from the muda region of malaysia often regarded as the archetypical farm household economy

noncooperative decision making in the household evidence from malawi this paper proposes a novel test of productive efficiency in the household that also allows a test of noncooperative decision making i extend the collective model chiappori 1988 1997 to allow labor choices to affect future bargaining power by raising the value of outside options even if household consumption sharing is efficient labor choices are no longer efficient using data on malawi where there is predetermined variation in land rights that determine outside options in marriage i show that individuals spend more time on agricultural labor and less time on wage labor when household land is theirs they also have lower overall income and consumption the results are inconsistent with the fully efficient collective model but consistent with a noncooperative model with limited commitment where individuals allocate their labor supply to maximize future bargaining power limited commitment can lead to inefficient allocations that reduce household welfare

risk preferences are not time preferences risk and time are intertwined the present is known while the future is inherently risky this is problematic when studying time prefer ences since uncontrolled risk can generate apparently present biased behavior we systematically manipulate risk in an intertemporal choice experiment discounted expected utility performs well with risk but when certainty is added common ratio predictions fail sharply the data cannot be explained by prospect theory hyperbolic discounting or preferences for resolution of uncertainty but seem consistent with a direct preference for certainty the data suggest strongly a difference between risk and time preferences jel c91 d81 d91 understanding individual decision making under risk and over time are two foundations of economic analysis 1 in both areas there has been research to suggest that standard models of expected utility eu and exponential discounting are flawed or incomplete regarding time experimental research has uncovered evidence of a present bias or hyperbolic discounting frederick loewenstein and o donoghue 2002 regarding risk there are number of well documented departures from eu such as the allais 1953 common consequence and common ratio paradoxes an organizing principle behind expected utility violations is that they seem to arise as so called boundary effects where certainty and uncertainty are combined camerer 1992 harless and camerer 1994 and starmer 2000 indicate that violations of expected utility are notably less prevalent when all choices are uncertain this observation is especially interesting when considering decisions about risk taking over time in particular certainty and uncertainty are combined in intertemporal decisions the present is known and certain while the future is inherently risky this observation is problematic if one intends to study time preference in isolation from

extra household factors and women farmers supply response in sub saharan africa abstract this note discusses extra household factors which may constrain the response of women farmers in sub saharan africa to an increase in prices of crops they sell the discussion focuses on property rights social norms transport facilities and the organization of markets

supply response in an agrarian economy with non symmetric gender relations abstract there is a growing recognition that gender relations matter for supply response to devaluation and other structural adjustment policies in sub saharan africa but most household models that introduce gender differentiation nevertheless preserve an essential symmetry between male and female household members and do not capture elements of subordination or coercion in male female relations this paper seeks to contribute by developing a model based on stackelberg type equations in which the husband occupies the position of firstmover reflecting his power to set the parameters for women s choices the model is contextualized with reference to tanzania