off the cliff and back credit conditions and international trade during the global financial crisis abstract we study the collapse of international trade flows during the global financial crisis using detailed data on monthly us imports we show that credit conditions were an important channel through which the crisis affected trade volumes by exploiting the variation in the cost of capital across countries and over time as well as the variation in financial vulnerability across sectors countries with higher interbank rates and thus tighter credit markets exported less to the us during the peak of the crisis this effect was especially pronounced in sectors that require extensive external financing have limited access to trade credit or have few collateralizable assets exports of financially vulnerable industries were thus more sensitive to the cost of external capital than exports of less vulnerable industries and this sensitivity rose during the financial crisis the quantitative implications of our estimates for trade volumes highlight the large real effects of financial crises and the potential gains from policy intervention

tax base effects and fiscal externalities of local capital taxation evidence from a panel of german jurisdictions abstract this paper provides empirical evidence on the tax base effects of local capital taxation using a large panel of german municipalities it tests whether both the local tax rate and the tax rate in adjacent jurisdictions affect the local tax base the results obtained from a spatial gmm approach confirm a strong negative impact of the local tax rate whereas the average tax rate of neighboring municipalities proves insignificant only if interacted with the relative population size of neighbors a significant positive impact is found indicating that externalities from taxing decisions of adjacent jurisdictions are experienced only by relatively small municipalities

collateral and credit rationing a review of recent empirical studies as a guide for future research abstract the relationship between firms and banks often suffers from informational opacity that may result in credit rationing in theory providing collateral to the bank can have a mitigating effect on these informational asymmetries and thus solve the credit rationing problem even though collateral is already a widespread debt contract feature recent trends predict that in the future collateral will become even more important for informationally opaque firms the aim of this paper is twofold first we provide a review of the recently growing empirical research on collateral as a remedy for credit rationing second we would like to pinpoint gaps and limitations in current empirical research most studies contend with a flawed research design by not distinguishing between business and personal collateral and excluding other information opaqueness reducing tools such as the strength of the relationship between borrower and lender loan maturity and covenants we also discuss the limitations of using a single equation estimation method and the usefulness of incorporating interaction effects into the estimation models finally we provide suggestions for fruitful research avenues that would fill these gaps and enrich the empirical knowledge in this research domain

impact of modern agricultural technologies on smallholder welfare evidence from tanzania and ethiopia this paper evaluates the potential impact of adoption of improved legume technologies on rural household welfare measured by consumption expenditure in rural ethiopia and tanzania the study utilizes cross sectional farm household level data collected in 2008 from a randomly selected sample of 1313 households 700 in ethiopia and 613 in tanzania the causal impact of technology adoption is estimated by utilizing endogenous switching regression this helps us estimate the true welfare effect of technology adoption by controlling for the role of selection problem on production and adoption decisions our analysis reveals that adoption of improved agricultural technologies has a significant positive impact consumption expenditure in per adult equivalent terms in rural ethiopia and tanzania this confirms the potential role of technology adoption in improving rural household welfare as higher consumption expenditure from improved technologies translate into lower poverty higher food security and greater ability to withstand risk an analysis of the determinants of adoption highlighted inadequate local supply of seed access to information and perception about the new cultivars as key constraints for technology adoption

are corporate tax rates or countries converging abstract the statutory rate and effective tax rate imposed on corporation income as well as the dispersion of these rates began to decline in the 1980s is this due to changes in the domestic determinants of corporate taxation or increases in international pressures for tax competition this paper finds clear evidence that the corporate tax rate is insulated from a country s revenue needs across countries there is no association of the expenditure gdp ratio with the corporate statutory rate and only weak evidence of a positive association with the average rate there is suggestive but not definitive evidence that the domestic role of the corporate tax as a backstop to the individual income tax is important across countries there is indeed a strong association between the top individual rate and the top statutory corporate rate there is intriguing evidence about the role of international competitive pressures on corporate taxation measures of openness are negatively associated with statutory corporate rates although not with revenues collected as a fraction of gdp strikingly larger more trade intensive countries do collect more corporate tax but this may be because these countries are more attractive venues for investment

state investment tax incentives a zero sum game abstract over the past four decades state investment tax incentives have proliferated this emergence of state investment tax credits itc and other investment tax incentives raises two important questions 1 are these tax incentives effective in achieving their stated objective to increase investment within the state 2 to the extent these incentives raise investment within the state how much of this increase is due to investment drawn away from other states to begin to answer these questions we construct a detailed panel dataset for 48 states for 20 years the dataset contains series on output and capital their relative prices and establishment counts the effects of tax variables on capital formation and establishments are measured by the jorgensonian user cost of capital that depends in a nonlinear manner on federal and state tax variables cross jurisdictional differences in state investment tax credits and state corporate tax rates entering the user cost combined with a panel that is long in the time dimension are key to identifying the effectiveness of state investment incentives two models are estimated the capital demand model is motivated by the first order condition for a profit maximizing firm and relates at the state level the capital output ratio to the relative user cost of capital the twin counties model exploits both the spatial breaks discontinuities in tax policy at state borders and our panel dataset to relate at the county level the relative user cost to the location of manufacturing establishments using the capital demand model we find that own state capital formation is substantially increased by tax induced reductions in the own state price of capital and more interestingly substantially decreased by tax induced reductions in the price of capital in competitive states similarly using our twin counties model we find that county manufacturing establishment counts around state borders are higher on the side of the border with the lower price of capital but the difference is economically small suggesting that establishments are much less mobile than overall capital extensions of the capital demand model also reveal that state capital tax policy appears to be a zero sum game among the states in that an equiproportionate increase in own state and competitive states user costs tends to have no effect on own state capital formation

assessing the impact of crop diversification on farm poverty in india summary crop diversification into high value crops hvcs can be a strategy to improve livelihood outcomes for farmers using data from a nationally representative survey we establish that households diversifying toward hvcs are less likely to be poor the biggest impact being for smallholders furthermore using continuous treatment matching we establish the relationship between degree of diversification share of area dedicated to hvc and poverty growers of hvcs need to allocate at least 50 area to hvcs to escape poverty effect of diversification on poverty is in general positive but it withers after a threshold probably because of constraints i e capital on smaller farms and labor on larger ones

ramsey discounting of ecosystem services most ecosystem services which are essential for human well being are globally declining while the production of consumption goods measured by gdp is still growing to adequately account for this opposite development in public cost benefit analyses it has been proposed based on a two goods extension of the ramsey growth model to apply good specific discount rates for manufactured consumption goods and for ecosystem services using empirical data for ten ecosystem services across five countries and the world at large we estimated the difference between the discount rates for ecosystem services and for manufactured consumption goods in a conservative estimate we found that ecosystem services in all countries should be discounted at rates that are significantly lower than the ones for manufactured consumption goods on global average ecosystem services should be discounted at a rate that is 0 9 pm 0 3 points lower than the one for manufactured consumption goods the difference is larger in less developed countries and smaller in more developed countries this result supports and substantiates the suggestion that public cost benefit analyses should use country specific dual discount rates one for manufactured consumption goods and one for ecosystem services

corporate taxes and the location of intangible assets within multinational firms intangible assets like patents and trademarks are increasingly seen as the key to competitive success and as the drivers of corporate profit moreover they constitute a major source of profit shifting opportunities in multinational enterprises mnes due to a highly intransparent transfer pricing process this paper argues that for both reasons mnes have an incentive to locate intangible property at affiliates with a relatively low corporate tax rate using panel data on european mnes and controlling for unobserved time constant heterogeneity between affiliates we find that the lower a subsidiary s corporate tax rate relative to other affiliates of the multinational group the higher is its level of intangible asset investment this effect is statistically and economically significant even after controlling for subsidiary size and accounting for a dynamic intangible investment pattern

a theory of interregional tax competition a general equilibrium model is constructed to study tax competition where local governments compete for capital by holding down property tax rates and public expenditure levels an exact definition of tax competition is provided and both the existence and nonexistence of tax competition are shown to be theoretically possible it is argued however that tax competition must occur under empirically reasonable conditions inefficiency in public production is also explicitly modeled the amount of capital used to produce a given level of public service output is shown to be greater than that which is required to minimize costs evaluated at the prices facing private firms

impact of improved maize adoption on welfare of farm households in malawi a panel data analysis summary this paper assesses rural households decision to use improved maize varieties in malawi and examines its impact on household welfare using a three year household panel data the distributional effect of maize technology adoption is investigated by looking at impacts across wealth and gender groups we applied control function approach and iv regression to control for possible endogeneity of input subsidy and area under improved maize we found that area under improved maize varieties is positively correlated with own maize consumption income and asset holdings we found evidence that improved maize adoption has a stronger impact on welfare of poorer households

valuing environmental commodities some recent experiments a general model of consumer behavior is proposed to assess six recent experiments that have attempted to reveal preferences for environmental goals each experiment used a mix of both the techniques and the theory of demand for non market commodities and each was designed to estimate a non market attitude associated with the environment and to analyze potential biases in the techniques the six cases show some consistency in results the linkage within the contingent market between the environmental attribute institutional setting and the bidding instrument must be realistic and accepted by the respondent to avoid biased results possibly the most important result is the replication of results using a traditional property value study and a contingent bidding approach all evidence obtained to date suggests that hedonic studies of property values or wages travel costs and survey techniques all yield values well one order of magnitude in accuracy 41 references 2 tables

the effects of potential land development on agricultural land prices abstract we conduct a national scale analysis of the determinants of agricultural land values the theoretical basis for the study is a spatial city model with stochastic returns to future land development the empirical model of agricultural land prices is estimated with a cross section on approximately three thousand counties in the contiguous us the results provide evidence that option values associated with irreversible and uncertain land development are capitalized into current farmland values for each county we decompose the current agricultural land value into components measuring rents from agricultural production and rents from future land development

extra credit bank finance and firm export status in germany this paper estimates the exporter premium in bank lending we examine credit relationships in germany covering all loans of more than 1 5 million euro over the period from 2005 to 2010 having controlled for a wide range of other firm and bank characteristics our results indicate that exporting firms take out loans around 15 percent larger than those of nonexporters

the role of credit constraints on firms exporting and importing activities this article investigates the role of credit constraints on export import and two way trade activities of european manufacturing firms using direct financial constraints indicators and accounting for endogeneity issues we find that credit rationing significantly reduces both the probability of entering foreign markets and the intensive margins of trade empirical results also point out that the role of extra entry costs differs according to the location of foreign markets and to the type of imported goods and services conditional on trading in the european union rationing is not an obstacle to entering additional exporting and importing markets even though two way traders behave differently and are negatively affected by financial constraints when they enter non eu markets

the advantages of contingent valuation methods for benefit cost analysis the preceding is a taxonomic discussion of some reasons why contingent market methods may often be a superior means of generating data with which to value non market commodities we have argued that economists have erred in viewing the situations these methods posit as necessarily fictional that the data generated by the methods may for non marketed goods and the activities with which they are associated accord more closely with the conditions of received economic theory that the methods can make it easier to remove the difficulties of estimation and interpretation introduced by confounding variables and that they often permit one to deal more readily with phenomena that have not been in the range of historical experience nevertheless whatever the advantages a major disadvantage remains until detailed analytical knowledge is acquired of the manner in which expectations are formed there exists no way to refute empirical propositions established from contingent markets nevertheless the previously mentioned south coast air basin experiment where the bids obtained for clean air conformed fairly closely to the values implied in a residential property value study suggest that contingent valuations have a basis in the real decision processes of consumers

how elastic are national corporate income tax bases in oecd countries the role of domestic and foreign tax rates abstract to what extent do reductions in corporate income tax cit rates attract foreign tax bases what are the revenue implications of a unilateral tax reduction when tax bases are internationally mobile these questions are explored using annual data from 17 oecd countries spanning the period 1982 to 2005 controlling for fixed country effects year effects and country time trends and subjecting our results to an extensive robustness analysis we find i a country s aggregate reported corporate profits are negatively and significantly affected by cit rate reductions in neighbouring countries ii a unilateral reduction in the domestic cit rate results in lower domestic cit revenues

linking smallholders to markets determinants and impacts of farmer collective action in kenya summary this article investigates determinants and impacts of cooperative organization using the example of smallholder banana farmers in kenya farmer groups are inclusive of the poor although wealthier households are more likely to join employing propensity score matching we find positive income effects for active group members yet price advantages of collective marketing are small and high value market potentials have not yet been tapped beyond prices farmer groups function as important catalysts for innovation adoption through promoting efficient information flows we discuss the conditions under which collective action is useful and through what mechanisms the potential benefits emerge

papers in experimental economics competitive market institutions double auctions vs sealed bid offer auctions consider a market with the following characteristics 1 privacy that is each agent knows only his own valuation or cost conditions 2 exchange follows the rules of the oral double auction that is buyers freely announce bids or accept offers and sellers freely announce offers or accept bids 3 aggregate market supply and demand per trading period is stationary for at least two to three periods and 4 there are at least four buyers and as many sellers the literature reporting the results of a large number of experimental markets with these characteristics documents what appears to be a remarkably rapid convergence to a competitive equilibrium ce however any claim of double auction da convergence to the ce can only have meaning in one of three senses i the ce is attained immediately ii after t periods of trading some measure of the market s state such as mean price is nearer relative to experimental sampling variability to a ce than to some distinct alternative equilibrium such as a monopoly or nash equilibrium iii after t periods of trading this measure is nearer to a ce in da experimental markets than in markets organized under a different institution of contract for example a sealed bid auction since everything from electrons and the stars to rats and people yield state measures subject to error or random variation the deterministic criterion i can have no serious scientific standing by such criteria any hypothesis can be rejected and there could be no science of physics biology or economics 2 with the exception of certain very simple markets such as single object auctions or certain idealized markets such as the cournot quantity adjuster model economics has only two concepts of equilibrium monopoly and competitive the only formal model of da trading that has been proposed see david easley and john ledyard p 6 predicts stochastic convergence in finite time with probability one to a ce hence the only test alternative to the ce research hypothesis in da markets is a monopoly or monopsony equilibrium experimentalists have not reported statistical tests of the ce professor department of economics university of arizona assistant professor department of economics indiana university instructor department of economics university of arizona and sandia national laboratories albuquerque nm respectively we are indebted to the national science foundation for research support and to art denzau and mort kamien for helpful comments there is an early and recently growing body of experimental evidence for convergence to a competitive equilibrium under double auction rules the earliest evidence contained in experiments initiated in january 1956 is reported in smith 1962 1964 1965 1976 however these early experiments used between twenty and fifty or so participant buyers and sellers because in keeping with prevailing professional beliefs it was thought that a ce was unlikely to be approached unless numbers were quite large using large numbers was not unreasonable since it is a good beginning procedure to give a theory whatever is believed to be its best shot more recent evidence using six buyers six sellers and two traders in speculative da markets with cyclical demand is reported by r m miller charles plott and smith and williams 1979 for evidence from a comparison of oral and computerized da experiments with four buyers and four sellers see williams 1980 for further evidence in the context of the study of price controls see m isaac and plott 1981b and smith and williams 1981b in the context of a conspiracy study see isaac and plott 1981a in the context of comparisons between da and posted offer pricing see jon ketcham smith and williams in the context of a study of four variations on da rules see smith and williams 1980 all of these more recent papers report double auction experiments using no more than four buyers and four sellers 2as frederick mosteller once noted if you wanted to reject the inverse square law of attraction try tossing a sheet of paper out the window

taxes institutions and foreign diversification opportunities abstract investors can access foreign diversification opportunities through either foreign portfolio investment fpi or foreign direct investment fdi the worldwide tax regime employed by the us potentially distorts this choice by penalizing fdi relative to fpi in low tax countries on the other hand weak investor protections in foreign countries may increase the value of control creating an incentive to use fdi rather than fpi by combining data on us outbound fpi and fdi this paper analyzes whether the composition of us outbound capital flows reflects these incentives to bypass home and host country institutional regimes the results suggest that the residual tax on us multinational firms foreign earnings skews the composition of outbound capital flows a 10 decrease in a foreign country s corporate tax rate increases us investors equity fpi holdings by approximately 10 controlling for effects on fdi investor protections also seem to shape portfolio choices though these results are not robust when only within country variation is employed

farmland retention techniques property rights implications and comparative evaluation a conceptual framework distinguishes farmland retention institutions and with a survey of various literatures interviews and original policy design classifies 28 techniques in four types regulatory incentive based governmental participatory and hybrid the analysis reveals that techniques often perceived to be incentive based such as pdr pace and tdr are better understood as participatory and hybrid techniques respectively likely fiscal impacts stakeholder acceptability and implementation challenges are assessed the framework suggests that when governments select multiple techniques attention should be paid to the implied allocation of property rights to maintain coherent land use policy and minimize property rights conflicts

the boundaries of multinational enterprises and the theory of international trade this paper begins with a review of empirical evidence on multinational firms conceptual underpinnings of a theory are developed relying in particular on the notion of knowledge capital as a mobile joint input into geographically separated production facilities this idea is embedded in a simple two country general equilibrium model that supports multinational production in equilibrium under conditions consistent with the empirical evidence the final section examines internalization and shows why certain properties of knowledge capital also imply a preference for transferring technologies internally within the firm rather than through arm s length markets

budget spillovers and fiscal policy interdependence evidence from the states abstract this paper formalizes and tests the notion that states expenditures depend on the spending of similarly situated states we find that even after allowing for fixed state effects year effects and common random shocks among neighbors a state government s level of per capita expenditure is positively and significantly affected by the expenditure levels of its neighbors ceteris paribus a one dollar increase in a state s neighbors expenditures increases its own expenditure by over 70 cents

does adaptation to climate change provide food security a micro perspective from ethiopia we examine the driving forces behind farmers decisions to adapt to climate change and the impact of adaptation on farmers food production we investigate whether there are differences in the food production functions of farm households that adapted and those that did not adapt we estimate a simultaneous equations model with endogenous switching to account for the heterogeneity in the decision to adapt or not and for unobservable characteristics of farmers and their farm we compare the expected food production under the actual and counterfactual cases that the farm household adapted or not to climate change we find that the group of farm households that adapted has systematically different characteristics than the group of farm households that did not adapt the relationship between production and average temperature is inverted u shaped for farm households that adapted while it is u shaped for farm households that did not adapt and vice versa in the case of precipitation we find that adaptation increases food production however the impact of adaptation on food production is smaller for the farm households that actually did adapt than for the farm households that did not adapt in the counterfactual case that they adapted

the determinants of municipal tax rates in british columbia in this paper we study the regional pattern of municipal business property tax rates in the province of british columbia reduced form tax setting equations produce some evidence that municipal governments respond to tax changes in neighbouring jurisdictions a joint investigation of the determinants of tax base and municipal taxation decisions however reveals that it is difficult to interpret this response as arising primarily out of competition over tax base there is also some evidence that municipal tax rates are sensitive to taxes set on the same base by super municipal bodies jel classification c33 h71 les determinants des taux d imposition municipale en colombie britannique dans ce memoire les auteurs etudient le pattern regional des taux d imposition municipale sur la propriete fonciere commerciale dans la province de la colombie britannique on montre a l aide d un modele en forme reduite d equations de definition des taux d imposition que les gouvernements municipaux reagissent aux changements dans les taux d imposition dans leur voisinage cependant un examen conjoint des determinants de la base d imposition et des decisions municipales montre qu il est difficile d interpreter cette reaction comme emanant d une concurrence fiscale on montre aussi que les taux d imposition municipale sont sensibles aux niveaux de fiscalite imposes sur la meme base par les autorites supra municipales

the impact of r d activities on exports of german business services enterprises first evidence from a continuous treatment approach this study uses newly available representative data from german business services firms and a continuous treatment approach based on the generalised propensity score to test for a causal effect of r d activities measured by the share of engineers and natural scientists in all employees on the share of exports in total sales we find evidence for a positive and statistically significant but small causal effect this result is in line with the non causal results reported in innovation globalization and firm dynamics lessons for enterprise policy new york routledge 2014 and 137 based on regression models with and without control for unobserved time invariant firm characteristics the bottom line then is that r d activity does matter for success of german business services firms on export markets but not much

the application of laboratory experimental economics to the contingent valuation of public goods we have implicitly argued in the last section that a dynamic iterative survey mechanism may well need to be employed in the design of contingent valuation survey instruments in order to improve the accuracy of responses furthermore due to the current inaccuracy of hedonic and travel cost approaches for valuing public goods the least cost method in our view for establishing anchor or true individual values for testing alternative survey instruments is to use laboratory experiments the objective of these experiments should be the development of the most simple survey design which gives accurate responses subject to the budget of the investigator is a complex iterative voting procedure required how fast will such a procedure converge to true values what is the effect on incentives of relaxing the unanimity voting feature for large groups all of these operational questions can at least qualitatively be answered in an experimental laboratory setting

an experimental market for public goods the pbs station program cooperative beginning with the 1974 75 season the public broadcasting service pbs undertook a three year experiment to decentralize through a market process the selection of programs to be broadcast over the national noncommercial television network the experimental market called the station program cooperative spc enables each of the approximately 150 participating stations to vote with dollars for the programs they prefer based on information about the subject matter quality and costs of the alternatives the spc had two purposes the first was to determine whether a decentralized market mechanism for acquiring national programming can be established that first has a reasonable cost and second retains the basic features of a network a network is a means of centralizing the acquisition transmission and promotion of programming although the advantages of networking are several probably the most important is that it saves substantial transactions cost in comparison to the two other alternatives syndication in which each station negotiates for nationally distributed programs with the owner of the rights to the program and localism in which each station produces its own programming see bruce owen jack beebe and willard manning the second purpose of the spc is to determine its impact upon the types of programs that are broadcast centralized programming authorities such as the present commercial networks and the corporation for public broadcasting because they are few in number are relatively easy targets for political pressure with respect to program content may at least tacitly collude in programming decisions and in any event have limited experience concerning the nature of the demand for programs in all markets in the network system see noll merton peck and john mcgowan ch 8 because of the cost advantages of networking and the technical barriers to entry of new networks in principle a network can produce an inefficient programming mix and still meet minimum standards of profitability or in the case of the noncommercial sector public acceptability concomitantly station managers may be too unsophisticated about judging programming quality and sensing the structure of demand in the local market to select programming that in benefit cost terms is better than that selected by a centralized decision maker while direct evidence on which system works better is not possible to acquire two useful questions can be answered at least in principle 1 do the spc and centralized decision making lead to the selection of different programs and if so is that difference systemmatic and 2 xvhich system produces higher audience california institute of technology financial support for preparing this paper was provided by the national science foundation rann program grant apr76 01920 we are indebted to richard beatty and pbs for providing us with remarkably complete data for all three spcs we are of course solely responsible for the contents of this paper

agricultural technology crop income and poverty alleviation in uganda summary this paper evaluates the ex post impact of adopting improved groundnut varieties on crop income and poverty in rural uganda the study utilizes cross sectional data of 927 households collected in 2006 from seven districts in uganda using propensity score matching methods we find that adopting improved groundnut varieties technology significantly increases crop income and reduces poverty the positive and significant impact on crop income is consistent with the perceived role of new agricultural technologies in reducing rural poverty through increased farm household income this study supports broader investment in agriculture research to address vital development challenges reaching the poor with better technologies however requires policy support for improving extension efforts access to seeds and market outlets that simulate adoption

non farm work and food security among farm households in northern ghana this paper examines the impact of non farm work on household income and food security among farm households in the northern region of ghana we analyze the impact by employing propensity score matching method that accounts for self selection bias the matching results show that participation in non farm work exerts a positive and statistically significant effect on household income and food security status supporting the widely held view that income from non farm work is crucial to food security and poverty alleviation in rural areas of developing countries

why pay more corporate tax avoidance through transfer pricing in oecd countries this paper presents suggestive evidence of income shifting in response to differences in corporate tax rates for a large selection of oecd countries we use a new method to disentangle the income shifting effects from the effects of tax rates on real activity our baseline estimates suggest that a substantial share of the revenues from a unilateral increase in the corporate tax rate is lost because of a decline in reported income

information and strategyproofness in joint project selection abstract we introduce the following multi activity public goods problem with excludables a group of agents with limited budgets is to select a subset of new technologies to be developed each technology has a known cost and may provide different returns which are private information to the agents agents coordinate their activities through a central administrator once purchased technologies are used freely by all contributors through examining information provided to the agents and the administrator we create a bounded rationality environment and provide a strategyproof selection and cost allocation mechanism under a particular decision criterion

the effect of globalization on the performance of small and medium sized enterprises in the united states does owners race ethnicity matter small and medium sized enterprises smes i e firms with fewer than 500 employees play an important role in the us economy smes represent 99 9 percent of the 25 8 million businesses and have generated 60 80 percent of net new jobs annually over the last decade thus in order to understand the effect of globalization on the us economy one has to know how globalization affects smes this paper examines whether firms that operate in more globalized regions earn less profit we carry out a separate analysis for white owned and minority owned firms because the determinants of profits are different for the two types of firms and therefore estimates from an analysis using pooled data will be biased we use total exports exports by smes and assets of multinational corporations mncs as measures of globalization exports by smes reflect the extent of globalizationinduced competition by small firms and the assets of mncs are a measure of competition by foreign firms and also a proxy for foreign direct investment fdi in a region furthermore the measures capture two important aspects of globalization international trade and fdi

the impact of improved maize varieties on poverty in mexico a propensity score matching approach summary this study examines the adoption of improved maize germplasm in oaxaca and chiapas in mexico it employs a propensity score matching approach to analyze the impact of the adoption of improved maize varieties on household income and poverty reduction using cross sectional data of 325 farmers from the two regions the findings reveal a robust positive and significant impact of improved maize variety adoption on farm household welfare measured by per capita expenditure and poverty reduction specifically the empirical results suggest that adoption of improved maize varieties helped raise household per capita expenditure by an average of 136 173 mexican pesos thereby reducing their probability of falling below the poverty line by roughly 19 31

corporate tax elasticities a reader s guide to empirical findings corporate taxes exert a variety of effects on business behaviour a wealth of empirical evidence assesses the magnitude of these behavioural margins of taxation this article offers an up to date review and aims to provide common ground by computing for each distortion the semi elasticity of the corporate tax base we pay particular attention to international investment where it is not a priory clear whether marginal investment decisions or discrete locations are most important using anextension of the meta analysis of de mooij and ederveen 2003 we explore the extent to which existing studies reveal differences in effect size between the intensive and extensive margins of international investment

adoption of improved wheat varieties and impacts on household food security in ethiopia this article evaluates the impact of the adoption of improved wheat varieties on food security using a recent nationally representative dataset of over 2000 farm households in ethiopia we adopted endogenous switching regression treatment effects complemented with a binary propensity score matching methodology to test robustness and reduced selection bias stemming from both observed and unobserved characteristics we expand this further with the generalized propensity score gps approach to evaluate the effects of continuous treatment on the response of the outcome variables we find a consistent result across models indicating that adoption increases food security and farm households that did adopt would also have benefited significantly had they adopted new varieties this study supports the need for vital investments in agricultural research for major food staples widely consumed by the poor and efforts to improve access to modern varieties and services policies that enhance diffusion and adoption of modern wheat varieties should be central to food security strategies in ethiopia

asymmetric tax competition abstract the paper analyzes nash equilibrium when two jurisdictions set tax rates on a tax base which is mobile between them population differences imply tax differences the smaller jurisdiction levies a lower tax rate in equilibrium and its residents are better off than those in the larger jurisdiction the nash equilibrium is inefficient if the two jurisdictions merged the resulting allocation would be efficient however if differences in population are great enough residents of the small jurisdiction would be made worse off by such a merger

the growth and variability of regional taxes an application to italy abstractthe growth and variability of regional taxes an application to italy regional studies this paper investigates the potential long term growth and short term cyclical stability of the italian regional tax system short and long run elasticities with respect to regional gross domestic product gdp are estimated between 2001 and 2012 for the surtax on central personal income tax rpit and for the regional tax on productive activities rtpa cyclical reactions are more marked for the rtpa and higher in the southern regions significant long run growth of the rpit and rtpa on the other hand is found only in the northern regions the results suggest that the behaviour of regional taxes may increase the italian north south gap and cast some doubt on these taxes in financing essential public services such as health in each region

financing patterns around the world are small firms different using a firm level survey database covering 48 countries we investigate how financial and institutional development affects financing of large and small firms our database is not limited to large firms but includes small and medium size firms and data on a broad spectrum of financing sources including leasing supplier development and informal finance small firms and firms in countries with poor institutions use less external finance especially bank finance protection of property rights increases external financing of small firms significantly more than of large firms mainly due to its effect on bank finance small firms do not use disproportionately more leasing or trade finance compared with larger firms so these financing sources do not compensate for lower access to bank financing of small firms we also find that larger firms more easily expand external financing when they are constrained than small firms finally we find suggestive evidence that the pecking order holds across countries

adoption of modern varieties farmers welfare and crop biodiversity evidence from uganda abstract this paper assesses the impact of modern varieties adoption on farmers welfare and crop biodiversity conserved in situ using nationally representative data collected in 2009 2010 in uganda an endogenous switching regression model estimates the net economic and environmental effects of switching from local landraces to modern species results show that after controlling for market and agro ecological factors the local varieties perform better than modern ones in marginalized and climatic vulnerable areas crop biodiversity shows to play a fundamental role in farmers risk minimizing strategies when the available modern varieties are not adaptable to the local context and not supported by the required level of agro intensification rural development policies should consider the heterogeneity in the adoption returns and support diversity conservation as a national strategic asset for a suitable bioprospecting and a best fitting agricultural system implementation

valuing future development rights the costs of conservation easements while theory strongly suggests that restricting development rights should reduce land prices empirical evidence of this effect has been hard to obtain largely based on this difficulty legislation governing the tax benefits that easement donors may receive is periodically challenged we collect data on 131 land transactions in south central wisconsin including 19 cases of development restricted parcels when we use the whole sample to estimate the impact of conservation easements we replicate the results of nickerson and lynch nickerson c j lynch 2001 the effect of farmland preservation programs on farmland prices american journal of agricultural economics 83 2 341 351 finding a negative but statistically insignificant effect however we then show that when the sample is appropriately restricted to a more homogenous group of land parcels our ability to detect an effect increases dramatically in particular for vacant agricultural land we find a statistically significant negative impact of conservation easements that ranges up to 50 of land values

exports and profitability first evidence for german manufacturing firms using unique recently released nationally representative high quality longitudinal data at the enterprise level for germany this paper presents the first comprehensive evidence on the relationship between exports and profitability it documents that the positive profitability differential of exporters compared to non exporters is statistically significant though rather small when observed firm characteristics and unobserved firm specific effects are controlled for in contrast to nearly all empirical studies on the relationship between productivity and exports we do not find any evidence for selfselection of more profitable firms into export markets due to the sampling frame of the data used we cannot test the hypothesis that firms which start exporting perform better in the years after the start than their counterparts which do not start instead we use a newly developed continuous treatment approach and show that exporting improves the profitability almost over the whole range of the export sales ratio only firms that generate 90 percent and more of their total sales abroad do not benefit from exporting in terms of an increased rate of profit this means that the usually observed higher productivity of exporters is not completely absorbed by the extra costs of exporting or by higher wages paid by internationally active firms

valuing public goods a comparison of survey and hedonic approaches although the theory of public goods has progressed rapidly since paul samuelson s seminal article the empirical measurement of the value of demand for public goods only recently has received increased attention perhaps the best known and most widely accepted empirical approach has been the use of hedonic prices wherein for example it is assumed that either wages or housing values reflect spatial variation in public good characteristics of different communities this indirect approach based on theoretical work of charles tiebout kelvin lancaster sherwin rosen and others has proven quite successful among public goods or bads which have been valued using the hedonic approach are climate i hoch air pollution robert anderson and thomas crocker d harrison and d rubinfeld social infrastructure r cummings et al and other community characteristics such as noise level j nelson and ethnic composition ann schnare an alternative approach is to directly ask households or individuals to state their willingness to pay for public goods using survey techniques despite arguments that strategic bias will invalidate survey results there exists the need for an alternative to the hedonic approach as an example consider the case of a remote and unique scenic vista valuable to recreators which is threatened by air pollution from a proposed coal fired plant a typical situation in the western united states although it is possible in principle to impute the value of clean air and visibility from the relative decline in local visitation which might follow construction of a power plant information on the value of visibility at the site is needed prior to construction for socially optimal decision making on plant location and pollution control equipment the hedonic approach is unavailable both because the scarcity of local population as opposed to recreators makes use of wage or property value data impossible and because scenic vistas may themselves be unique for these reasons a randall et al first applied survey methods for valuing visibility and other environmental effects of large coal fired power plants in the four corners region of new mexico since this initial application the survey approach has been widely used to value environmental commodities where market data for hedonic analysis is difficult to acquire see for example brookshire ives and schulze rowe et al brookshire et al other early attempts to value public goods using the survey approach include r davis peter bohm and j hammack and g brown although results of using the survey approach for estimating the value of public goods appear to be internally consistent replicable and consistent with demand theory see schulze et al little work on external validation has been reported thus the purpose of this paper is to report on an experiment designed to validate the survey approach by direct comparison to a hedonic property value study the los angeles metropolitan area was chosen for the experiment because of the well defined air pollution problem and be assistant professor university of wyoming assistant professor university of missouri rolla associate professor university of wyoming and professor university of wyoming respectively the research reported here was funded under a grant methods development for assessing air pollution control benefits from the u s environmental protection agency we would like to give special thanks to alan carlin and shelby gerking for their helpful suggestions and contributions additional helpful comments were received from a myrick freeman iii john tschirhart and james murdoch all conclusions are of course our sole responsibility

social protection for enhanced food security in sub saharan africa this paper identifies several positive synergies between social protection programmes and enhanced entitlements to food one function of social protection is to manage or reduce vulnerability several instruments are reviewed weather indexed insurance public works programmes emergency food aid and buffer stock management which aim to stabilise income and access to food across good and bad years or between the harvest and the hungry season other social protection instruments aim to raise household income and crop production for instance agricultural input subsidies or input trade fairs as well as public works projects that construct or maintain physical infrastructure such as rural feeder roads this paper also argues that entitlements to food can be strengthened if social justice principles are introduced to the design and delivery of social protection programmes examples reviewed include rights based approaches such as employment guarantee schemes community based targeting and demand driven accountability mechanisms the paper concludes by arguing for a comprehensive approach to social protection that will achieve sustainable food security by combining interventions that stabilise income or food production with those that raise income or food production and are designed and delivered in ways that enhance social justice

do countries compete over corporate tax rates this paper tests whether oecd countries compete with each other over corporate taxes in order to attract investment we develop two models with firm mobility countries compete only over the statutory tax rate or the effective average tax rate while with capital mobility countries compete only over the effective marginal tax rate we estimate the parameters of reaction functions using data from 21 countries between 1983 99 we find evidence that countries compete over all three measures but particularly over the statutory tax rate and the effective average tax rate this is consistent with a belief amongst governments that location choices by multinational firms are discrete we also find evidence of concave reaction functions consistent with the model outlined in the paper

do agricultural land preservation programs reduce farmland loss evidence from a propensity score matching estimator more than 80 governmental entities concerned about sprawl open space and farmland have implemented purchase of development rights pdr programs preserving 2 23 million acres at a cost of 5 47 billion are pdr programs effective in slowing the rate and acres of farmland loss employing propensity score matching methods and a 50 year 269 county data set for six mid atlantic states we find empirical evidence that pdr programs have had a statistically significant effect on farmland loss having a pdr program decreases a county s rate of farmland loss by 40 to 55 and decreases farmland acres lost by 375 to 550 acres per year

pigou tiebout property taxation and the underprovision of local public goods abstract pigou s proposition that the use of distorting taxes rather than neutral head taxes reduces public service levels is examined in this paper a simple model with a national system of competing local governments is utilized to demonstrate that the use of a distorting property tax on mobile capital decreases the level of residential public services the case where public services are an intermediate producer good is also considered

estimation of limited dependent variable models with dummy endogenous regressors applied economists have long struggled with the question of how to accommodate binary endogenous regressors in models with binary and nonnegative outcomes i argue here that much of the difculty with limited dependent variables comes from a focus on structural parameters such as index coefcients instead of causal effects once the object of estimation is taken to be the causal effect of treatment several simple strategies are available these include conventional two stage least squares multiplicative models for conditional means linear approximation of nonlinear causal models models for distribution effects and quantile regression with an endogenous binary regressor the estimation strategies discussed in the article are illustrated by using multiple births to estimate the effect of childbearing on employment status and hours of work

forest clearing livelihood strategies and welfare evidence from the tsimane in bolivia this study analyzes the relationship between forest households livelihood strategies and forest clearing and the relationship of both to welfare the analysis relies on a rich panel dataset collected on the tsimane communities in bolivia to highlight how forest households combine sales and wage activities forest clearing is associated with all livelihood strategies but the association with welfare differs depending on the strategy pursued households that clear more and that generate their earnings by combining agricultural sales and wage activities are better off judged in terms of assets than those undertaking other strategies by contrast households in a subsistence strategy are not able to accumulate assets in the long run overall households clear only small areas of forest which has a positive effect on welfare and enables accumulation of assets

consumer s surplus without apology the purpose of this paper is to settle the controversy surrounding consumer s surplus and by so doing to validate its use as a tool of welfare economics i will show that observed consumer s surplus can be rigorously utilized to estimate the unobservable compensating and equivalent variations the correct theoretical measures of the welfare impact of changes in prices and income on an individual i derive precise upper and lower bounds on the percentage errors of approximating the compensating and equivalent variations with consumer s surplus these bounds can be explicitly calculated from observable demand data and it is clear that in most applications the error of approximation will be very small in fact the error will often be overshadowed by the errors involved in estimating the demand curve the results in no way depend upon arguments about the constancy of the marginal utility of income consequently this paper supplies specific empirical criteria which can replace the apologetic caveats frequently employed by those who presently apply consumer s surplus moreover the results imply that consumer s surplus is usually a very good approximation to the appropriate welfare measures to preview below i establish the validity of these rules of thumb for a

do zoning regulations rob rural landowners equity zoning regulations are land use control tools used to conserve resource land limit negative externalities from high density development and achieve agglomeration benefits from conserving large blocks of land however the passage of low density zoning is often challenged by landowners who claim that through it they lose their land s equity due to lower land values we investigate whether low density zoning impacts rural land value using arm s length sales in maryland s nine eastern shore counties using both a propensity score matching method and an instrumental variable approach we find that low density zoning has differentiated impacts resource parcels land values are unaffected and non resource parcels values decrease by 20 50

auctions experiments and contingent valuation laboratory experiments are a welcome development that promise to make a significant contribution to the study of economic behavior heiner 1985 plott 1982 smith 1982 1985 while relatively new to economics controlled laboratory studies of human behavior have long constituted the core of experimental psychology where there is a wealth of methodological experience from which experimental economists might profitably draw in particular current attempts to apply laboratory auction methods to valuing nonmarket environmental goods would be improved by more rigorous experimental design and data analysis procedures

incumbent behavior vote seeking tax setting and yardstick competition this paper develops a model of the political economy of tax setting in a multijurisdictional world where voters choices and incumbent behavior are determined simultaneously voters are assumed to make comparisons between jurisdictions to overcome political agency problems this forces incumbents into a yardstick competition in which they care about what other incumbents are doing we provide a theoretical framework and empirical evidence using u s state data from 1960 to 1988 the results are encouraging to the view that vote seeking and tax setting are tied together through the nexus of yardstick competition

finishing high school and starting college do catholic schools make a difference in this paper we consider two measures of the relative effectiveness of public and catholic schools finishing high school and starting college these measures are potentially more important indicators of school quality than standardized test scores in light of the economic consequences of obtaining more education single equation estimates suggest that for the typical student attending a catholic high school raises the probability of finishing high school or entering a four year college by thirteen percentage points in bivariate probit models we find almost no evidence that our single equation estimates are subject to selection bias

does cooperative membership improve household welfare evidence from apple farmers in china this paper examines the impact of cooperative membership on farm performance indicators such as apple yields net returns and household income using cross sectional data from a survey of farmers in china an endogenous switching regression model that accounts for selection bias is employed in the analysis the empirical results reveal that cooperative membership exerts a positive and statistically significant impact on apple yields farm net returns and household income a disaggregated analysis also reveals that small scale farms tend to benefit more from cooperatives than medium and large farms

revealed preference for public goods the most serious problem for the modern theory of optimal public expenditure is that although it has to be based on some social welfare function individual preferences for public goods which constitute the elements of any individualistic social welfare function are hard to assess it is argued that since every individual can freely participate in the consumption of a public good there is an incentive for him to either underreport or overreport his preferences depending on how the reported preferences are used in the financing process of the public good i this argument will be correct if an individual s preferences for public goods can be expressed only directly in many cases however the consumption of a public good has some technical or objective relationship with the consumption of some private goods thus the benefit an individual derives from free highways depends on how much he spends on a car and gasoline even the benefit an individual derives from the judicial system depends on how much he spends to hire the services of lawyers also an individual can enjoy the same security police provide by hiring private guards and installing locks and so on in these cases if we know the technical relationships between the consumption of private goods and the consumption of public goods then from the market data relating the amounts of private goods bought to prices and the data on the existing amounts of public goods we might be able to infer i the amounts of final goods consumed say the number of trips from one point to another the degree of justice the security from robbery etc and ii their opportunity costs which the individual was willing to pay but if we succeed in this inference then all that remains to be done in order to find the individual s utility function will be to integrate back the relationship between the amounts of final goods consumed and their opportunity costs a trivial example can be provided by assuming that each public good is perfectly substitutable with a private good let yi be the quantity of the ith public good and xi be the quantity of a private good which is a perfect substitute for the ith public good then the benefit derived from the ith public good and its perfect substitute can be measured by xi yi suppose we have ascertained an individual consumer s demand functions for private good when all the yi are zero we know from the revealed preference theory that if these demand functions satisfy a certain condition namely the symmetry of the slutsky matrix then there exists a utility function unique up to a monotone transformation

measuring the effects of preservation on farm profits in a continuous treatment setting abstractdespite billions of dollars of public appropriations to state purchase of development rights pdr programmes there has been limited evaluation of the effects of these investments on the economic performance of preserved farms this article estimates dose response functions to evaluate the effects of enrolment in new jersey s pdr programme on farm profitability the generalized propensity score method in a continuous treatment setting is used to address selection bias arising from voluntary programme participation treatment effects are measured across treatment levels to determine whether farm profitability is affected differently across levels of programme participation our findings reveal that relative to unpreserved farms profit per acre tends to increase along lower treatment levels the profit per acre of preserved farms in the 1 40 treatment range is on average 407 higher than that of unpreserved farms in the full sample positive profit differentials averaging between 317 and 472

trade finance and the great trade collapse pieces of evidence that support the trade finance channel first we show that export prices rose relative to domestic manufacturing prices across a large number of countries second we find that import and export prices of goods shipped by sea which are likely to be affected most by trade finance contractions rose disproportion ately more than those shipped by air or land

analysis of adoption and impacts of improved maize varieties in eastern zambia summary this paper analyzes the adoption and welfare impacts of improved maize varieties in eastern zambia using data obtained from a sample of over 800 farm households using both propensity score matching and endogenous switching regression models the paper shows that adoption of improved maize leads to significant gains in crop incomes consumption expenditure and food security results further show that improved maize varieties have significant poverty reducing impacts in eastern zambia the paper concludes with implications for policies to promote adoption and impacts of modern varieties in zambia

how much do taxes discourage incorporation the double taxation of corporate income should discourage firms from incorporating we investigate the extent to which the aggregate allocation of assets and taxable income in the united states between corporate and noncorporate firms responds to the size of this tax distortion during the period 1959 1986 in theory profitable firms should shift out of the corporate sector when the tax distortion is large and conversely for firms with tax losses our empirical results provide strong support for these forecasts and imply that the resulting excess burden equals 16 percent of business tax revenue one of the most basic distortions created by the double taxation of corporate income in the united states is the disincentive to incorporate even in most countries with integrated or partially integrated tax systems there are differential taxes across organizational forms however obvious this distortion may be most articles investigating the distortions created by the corporate tax have taken as exogenous a firm s choice whether or not to incorporate assuming for example that some industries are inherently corporate while others are inherently noncorporate a variety of nontax factors described below can certainly influence a firm s choice of organizational form causing some to favor incorporating and others not but are these nontax factors so dominant that taxes do not in practice influence a firm s choice of organizational form as gravelle and kotlikoff 1989 1993 emphasize tax induced changes in firms choices of organizational form in principle can create large excess burdens the size of these excess burdens in practice depends on the extent to which firms respond to these tax incentives in this article we calculate how the tax distortion discouraging firms from incorporating has varied over time then estimate the extent to which the allocation of assets and taxable income between corporate and noncorporate

the effect of farmland preservation programs on farmland prices government agencies in urbanizing areas are increasingly utilizing purchase and transfer of development rights programs to preserve farmland and protect local farm economies this article tests the effect of development restrictions imposed by permanent easement sales on farmland sales prices using maryland data we correct for selectivity bias due to the voluntary nature of these programs in estimating hedonic sales equations although preserved parcels actual land values are lower the effect of the restrictions is not statistically significant these findings may encourage additional participation in preservation programs or justify reductions in the easement prices paid by agencies copyright 2001 oxford university press

willingness to pay and compensation demanded experimental evidence of an unexpected disparity in measures of value aside from possible income effects measures of the maximum amounts people will pay to avoid a loss and the minimum compensation necessary for them to accept it are generally assumed to be equivalent unexpectedly wide variations between these sums however have been noted in survey responses to hypothetical options this paper reports the results of a series of experiments that confronted people with actual money payments and cash compensations the results indicate that the compensation measure of value seems to exceed significantly the willingness to pay measure which would appear to call into some question various rules of entitlement damage assessments and interpretations of indifference curves

impact of green control techniques on family farms welfare abstract using survey data of 375 family farms in five provinces of the huang huai hai plain this paper conducts a comprehensive measurement of family farms welfare within the framework of the capability approach theory furthermore using an endogenous switching regression model and a multinomial treatment effects model this paper evaluates the impact of the adoption or non adoption of green control techniques on family farms welfare and estimate the welfare effects of the degree and timing of adoption this research finds that the average treatment effect on family farm welfare with and without adopting green control techniques is significant at 0 084 and 0 046 respectively therefore green control techniques help to improve the welfare level of family farms compared with family farms that do not adopt green control techniques the welfare level of family farms adopting a high or low degree of green control techniques increases by 22 63 and 16 42 respectively and the welfare level of family farms given the early or late adoption of green control techniques increases by 5 87 and 7 57 respectively therefore the welfare effect of a high degree of adoption on family farms is greater and the welfare level of family farms with late adoption is higher

the impact of water conservation and intensification technologies empirical evidence for rice farmers in ghana this study employs the propensity score matching model to examine the impact of the adoption of water conservation and intensification technologies on farm output and income among small scale lowland rice farmers in the northern region of ghana the matching was conducted based on the mahalanobis distance combined with the propensity score balancing tests by checking the mean standardized absolute bias in the matched sample were conducted as well as a sensitivity analysis was conducted to check for hidden bias due to unobservable selection the empirical results show a positive and significant impact of the adoption of bunds technology on input demand as well as a positive but insignificant impact on output supply and net returns adopters of the dibbling technology were found to have higher output supply whereas no statistically significant difference was found between the incomes of adopters and nonadopters of dibbling seed method the results however reveal a positive and significant effect on output and net returns when the dibbling method is combined with intensified weeding the estimates were found to be relatively insensitive to hidden bias

international profit shifting within multinationals a multi country perspective abstract we model the opportunities and incentives generated by international tax differences for international profit shifting by multinationals the model considers not only profit shifting arising from international tax differences between affiliates and parent companies but also from tax differences between affiliates in different host countries our model yields the prediction that a multinational s profit shifting in a country depends on a weighted average of international tax rate differences between all countries where the multinational is active using a unique dataset containing detailed firm level information on the parent companies and subsidiaries of european multinationals and information about the international tax system we test our model and empirically examine the extent of intra european profit shifting by european multinationals on average we find a semi elasticity of reported profits with respect to the top statutory tax rate of 1 3 while shifting costs are estimated to be 0 6 of the tax base international profit shifting leads to a substantial redistribution of national corporate tax revenues many european nations appear to gain revenues from profit shifting by multinationals largely at the expense of germany