cooperation against theft a test of incentives for water management in tunisia water theft carried out by manipulating water meters constrains volumetric pricing in semi arid regions cooperative management can reduce theft and improve incentives for efficient water use by inducing peer monitoring using a theoretical model we show that theft is more likely when prices are high punishments are weak and cooperatives are large we also show how cooperative membership and punishment levels are determined endogenously by constraints on monitoring we test the model on data from tunisia for the years 2001 2003 relying on instruments that proxy for unobservable monitoring costs the results confirm that well designed incentives can reduce theft and that constraints on monitoring costs affect institutional design

truth effort and the legal battle in lawsuits relative success depends upon two main factors the true degree of fault and the efforts invested on eachside a proposed litigation success function displays thisdependence while satisfying other essential properties undertwo different protocols nash cournot and stackelberg solutions are obtained for the litigation efforts proportionate success and values of the lawsuit on each side outcomes are evaluated in terms of two normative criteria i achieving justice interpreted as equality between defendantfault and relative plaintiff success and ii minimizingaggregate litigation cost achievement of these aims isdetermined by the decisiveness of litigation effort relativeto true fault

sufficient fuel taxes would enhance ecologies economies and communities the model presented recently in this journal bybazin et al 2004 indicates that b the quality of theenvironment can be improved when taxationincreasesq as long as the magnitude of the environ mental tax is sufficient enough so that b thefinancial constraints imposed upon the consumerbecome too great and thus limit his desire to consumefurtherq in addition bosquet s 2000 survey ofenvironmental tax reform examples indicated thatshifts in tax burdens from socially desirable activities e g employment to socially undesirable activities e g pollution resource depletion and waste canlead to a ddouble dividendt where both environmentaland economic values are improved in terms of fueltaxes the weight of evidence from theory empiricalstudies and history indicates their strong potential forsimultaneous enhancement of environmental quality economic growth and quality of life as long as thesetaxes are sufficient and structured appropriately bazin et al 2004 emphasize in their modelingthat the introduction of a small tax or penalty canactually increase the consumptive behaviors of peoplewho perceive the tax to be payment for the right toconsume pollute or otherwise degrade public resour ces that is to say the environmental responsibility ofindividual actors can actually decrease with theintroduction of a tax or penalty if the penalty is toosmall the main empirical example of this compensa tory bcrowding out effectq cited by bazin et al 2004 was the observation by gneezy and rustichini 2000 p 3 of b a steady increase in the number of parentscoming lateq to pick up their children from day careafter a small late penalty was introduced it is reasonable to expect that imposing a nominalpenalty would erode parents punctuality at a day carecentre as these parents might perceive such a fine tobe a price for extracurricular services we expect nosuch erosion of responsible behavior to occur withrespect to automobile fuel consumption however because the consumptive behaviors of typical driversare environmentally irresponsible to start with unlikegneezy and rustichini s 2000 tardy parents typicaldrivers have negligible feelings of responsibilitytowards those adversely affected by their driving i e all people and all life including future gener ations if fuel taxes brought prices closer to dfull costpricingt revenues could be used to defray collateral

how resilient are labour markets to natural disasters the case of the 1998 bangladesh flood abstract natural disasters devastate economies as they impede capital accumulation the resilience of labour markets is crucial for the poor who rely on labour to reduce risk we evaluate how the 1998 flood of the century affected wages in bangladesh we find short term declines in agricultural and non agricultural wages agricultural workers who moved towards non agricultural employment to cope benefitted through a lower percentage reduction in short term wages endowed with human capital salaried workers were unable to mitigate income risk extending the eligibility of credit access or relief programmes may preserve local businesses and their employees in the years following a flood

agricultural household models extensions applications and policy this book presents the basic model of an agricultural household that underlies most of the case studies undertaken so far the model assumes that households are price takers and is therefore recursive the decisions modeled include those affecting production and the demand for inputs and those affecting consumption and the supply of labor comparative results on selected elasticities are presented for a number of economies the empirical significance of the approach is demonstrated in a comparison of models that treat production and consumption decisions separately and those in which the decisionmaking process is recursive the book summarizes the implications of agricultural pricing policy for the welfare of farm households marketed surplus the demand for nonagricultural goods and services the rural labor market budget revenues and foreign exchange earnings in addition it is shown that the basic model can be extended in order to explore the effects of government policy on crop composition nutritional status health saving and investment and to provide a more comprehensive analysis of the effects on budget revenues and foreign exchange earnings methodological topics primarily the data requirements of the basic model and its extensions along with aggregation market interaction uncertainty and market imperfections are discussed the most important methodological issues the question of the recursive property of these models is also discussed

caste female labor supply and the gender wage gap in india boserup revisited abstractthe gender wage gap is notable not just for its persistence and ubiquity but also for its variation across regions and countries a natural question is how greater workforce participation by women matters to female wages and the gender wage gap within india a seeming paradox is that gender differentials in agricultural wages are the largest in southern regions of india that are otherwise favorable to women ester boserup hypothesized that this is due to greater labor force participation by women in these regions this is not obvious as greater female labor supply could depress male wages as well other factors also need to be accounted for especially since women have fewer opportunities for nonfarm employment this article undertakes a formal test of the boserup proposition we find that differences in female labor supply are able to explain 55 of the gender wage gap between northern and southern states of india the article also finds that women gain from greater nonfarm employment even if

cooperative solution of local externality problems a case of mechanism design applied to irrigation abstract cooperative solutions to ameliorate externalities may be pareto superior compared to noncooperative abatement strategies but such solutions may not be adopted without appropriate institutional mechanisms to achieve cooperative outcomes voluntarily there must be methods of determining cost shares and identifying preferred solutions here the design of a process and a related algorithm are proposed based on concepts of welfare economics and game theory for public goods and externalities simulation of the process for an irrigation externality problem in the central valley of california demonstrates existence of a unanimously preferred solution with improved water quality

long term impacts of droughts on labour markets in developing countries evidence from brazil abstract climate shocks have well documented impacts on the short term welfare of rural households in developing countries we investigate the impact of droughts on brazilian labour markets we find long term rural wage losses beyond the immediate impact of the drought with affected workers taking five years to catch up with their peers findings are robust to model specification the severity of the losses varies with the dependence on agricultural income supporting the notion of diversifying portfolio strategies in rural areas to reduce climate related income risk

the trend in the male female wage gap in the united states despite the rise in the feminist movement the enactment of equal opportunity legislation and the rapid increase in women s labor force participation a substantial sex differential in wages has persisted in the united states for at least 4 decades measured by hourly earnings of year round workers this wage gap was 31 in 1955 widened to a 35 37 range by the 1960s and early 1970s and then narrowed to 33 by 1982 this paper examines the extent to which changes in the characteristics of men and women in the labor force and other factors can account for the observed pattern the main finding is that increases in women s labor force participation were initially associated with a declining skill level of employed women relative to employed men where skill is measured by years of schooling and job tenure more recently the work experience of employed women has been increasing which helps account for the recent narrowing trend in the wage gap during the 1970s the wage gap probably woul have narrowed m

rainfall shocks and the gender wage gap evidence from indian agriculture summary in the context of climate change and its effect on poverty previous studies have shown that productivity shocks in agriculture such as rainfall variability affect wages adversely none of the studies however consider the heterogeneity in the impact of these shocks on agricultural wages by gender a feature which has been studied for demand shocks in urban labor markets for developed countries using national sample survey data for india from 1993 to 2007 a district level panel dataset is created to examine how a rainfall shock affects the gender wage gap the study shows that both female and male wages are positively related to rainfall shocks hence future studies must study the impact of labor market shocks in rural areas on both female and male wages separately it also finds that the female to male wage ratio is significantly positively associated with a rainfall shock in regions where rainfed rice is cultivated i e low high rainfall reduces increases the female to male ratio the study demonstrates that this result is due to a positive association of demand for female labor with rainfall in these rainfed rice growing regions this finding is consistent with the greater marginal value of female labor in rice cultivation which is also a crop highly sensitive to rainfall variability under rainfed conditions the paper concludes that the effect of a rainfall shock on the gender wage gap depends upon the gender roles underlying the technology of production which varies across cropping systems

intra household labor supply migration and subsistence constraints in a risky environment evidence from rural el salvador abstract we investigate the use of intra household labor allocation as a means of risk coping when subsistence constraints matter in rural el salvador we show that households increase the labor supply of its male members to the family farm and abroad in the us after being subjected to adverse agricultural productivity shocks the latter is the result of a standard substitution effect whereas the former is the result of subsistence concerns theoretically these results are not at odds with each other if these events differentially impacted rich and poor households we also show that the earthquakes of 2001 resulted in large reductions in the number of female members who were sent abroad and large increases in hours of domestic labor supplied by female members we argue that this result is a consequence of subsistence motives because female labor supply at home increased despite lower remuneration

reputation and the control of pollution this paper investigates the effectiveness of reputation in inducing a polluting firm to self regulate its emissions when consumers have imperfect information in particular we ask to what extent must consumers reward and punish the firm before it chooses self regulation as its dominant strategy we find that if payoffs in the stage game are such that both the consumer and the polluting firm have beliefs that are consistent with each others behaviors then the firm has a positive probability of playing clean in each period of a finite game further we find that a weak reward punishment scheme may have an adverse effect on the environment and that there are both environmental and welfare gains associated with strengthening the scheme

explaining procyclical male female wage gaps abstract our analysis based on the national longitudinal survey of youth for the 1978 1999 period concludes that men s greater representation in cyclical occupational groups such as craftsmen operatives and laborers more than accounts for the gap between men and women in the cyclicality of real wages

the market for sulfur dioxide emissions the 1990 clean air act amendments initiated the first large scale use of the tradable permit approach to pollution control the theoretical case for this approach rests on the assumption of an efficient market for emission rights the authors empirical analysis shows that the emission rights market created by the 1990 amendments had become reasonably efficient by mid 1994 they also show that the auctions specified in the amendments to jump start trading had become a small part of the overall market finally the authors demonstrate that the strategic bidding behavior discussed in the literature has had no effect on market prices copyright 1998 by american economic association

the buffet syndrome midday menu and terry towels abstract in a recent article bazin et al bazin d ballet j touahri d 2004 environmental responsibility versus taxation ecological economics 49 2 129 134 argue that taxation produces a crowding out effect on responsible behaviours this crowding out effect is linked to the buffet syndrome e g wherein an environmental tax is like a food buffet in that when you pay you could consume as much as you want this article means to offer a perspective on this syndrome it shows that this syndrome comes into play only in certain circumstances and that explicit policies may avoid it in particular the development of clean goods and technologies may avoid the buffet syndrome

current issues in the economics of groundwater resource management the issue of groundwater management remains a practical concern in many regions throughout the world while water managers continue to grapple with the question of how to manage this resource in this article we attempt to bring the most advanced and appropriate tools to bear on the issue of resource allocation involving groundwater our objective is to demonstrate the state of the art in the literature on ways to think about this complex resource and to deal with the important economic issues emanating from its complexity we present the conceptual framework within which economists examine the elements interacting in the management of groundwater resources indicate why the role of the market is limited with respect to the price of this very complex resource and point to the mechanisms that can pull competitive groundwater price and quality graded quantity of groundwater in line with their equilibrium levels in particular we critically review economic models of groundwater use examine the potential for groundwater management discuss the difficulties encountered in the estimation of the relevant control variables of such models and identify the advantages and limitations of the instruments devised for the efficient use allocation of this resource finally we argue that devised regulatory schemes usually ignore the information and knowledge needed for their implementation and we suggest a core of conditions necessary for successful groundwater management reforms

entitling the pollutee liability versus standard under private information this paper considers and compares two different legal means full liability and standard to reduce and to regulate pollution at a local level accounting for private information about benefits and costs the familiar polluter pays principle makes the polluter liable for any damage since the courts lack information about the true damage the pollutee can and presumably will overstate this damage nevertheless voluntary arrangements bypassing the courts exist e g for coasean reasons however such out of court arrangements fail to improve in many cases the inefficient allocation of pollution due to agency costs given these unsatisfactory consequences of the polluter pays principle even after allowing for contracts around the law we propose a modification of standards the pollutee is entitled that a certain standard is satisfied yet can trade this right for financial compensations contracts induced by this legal rule are countervailing the optimal mechanism switches between subsidies and payments and first best efficiency holds at both ends and this characteristic allows such a privatized standard to track the first best quite well and often better than the polluter pays principle this relative ranking under private information is the opposite of the one that holds under uncertainty here liability dominates the standard

environmental responsibility versus taxation taxation as a tool of environmental economic policy traditionally aims at generating a discouraging effect upon both the consumer and producer environmental degradation should finally stabilize itself the mechanism of taxation replies to a behavioural stimulus taxes versus subsidies recent economic analyses have not aimed at focusing their studies concerning the very responsibility of economic actors on anything else other than the mechanism of taxation taxes thus imply responsible behaviour we shall attempt to highlight that responsibility could be defined independently from taxation and that the affirmation of responsibility is inversed to taxation technically speaking we shall demonstrate that the taxation extolled by the legislator induces a certain crowding out effect as regards to responsibility in the first part of this article we shall therefore insist that economic policies in terms of taxation drive away the sentiment of individual responsibility we shall reason in terms of production and consumption to demonstrate this fact finally we shall insist that a high degree of responsibility could substitute taxation

environmental tax reform efficiency and political feasibility although market based environmental measures like uniform co2 taxes reach a given standard at minimal cost they do not prevail in real world policies an effciency oriented environmental policy fails as it involves a redistributen of pollution rights resulting in a strong and generally effective opposition of the groups that forego economic rents the present paper analyzes the tradoff between efficiency and political feasibility of several co2 tax and reimbursement schemes using a computable general equilibrium model of switzerland the simulation results indicate that a policy combining a uniform co2 tax with differentiated labor subsidies preventing intersectoral redistribution is a better solution for the tradeoff than the presently existing tax schemes in various countries

psychological effect of taxation and responsibility a reply to thomas a okey and bruce a wright abstract in a recent article entitled sufficient fuel taxes would enhance ecologies economies and communities thomas a okey and bruce a wright defend tax increases as a means of reducing pollution levels caused by vehicles in their article okey and wright present the opposite view of that of bazin et al recently published in ecological economics the latter argue that taxation could have a crowding out effect on responsible behaviour the present article is intended as a response to that of thomas a okey and bruce a wright we shall defend the position that taxation is certainly not a unique solution nor is it the best solution to the problem of pollution

the role of common law in environmental policy this paper discusses the role of common law in environmental policy it is shown that common law actually tends towards efficiency only under quite restrictive conditions conditions that are fulfilled only for very few less important environmental problems moreover in these cases common law need not even be efficient because an efficient solution can be negotiated once the allocation of rights is undisputed furthermore common law neglects important distributional and political questions and is biased towards the status quo therefore dealing with today s environmental problems cannot be left to the common law process but necessitates legislative action

selling labor low wage responses to productivity shocks in developing countries productivity risk is pervasive in underdeveloped countries this paper highlights a way in which underdevelopment exacerbates productivity risk productivity shocks cause larger changes in the wage when workers are poorer less able to migrate and more credit constrained because of such workers inelastic labor supply this equilibrium wage effect hurts workers in contrast it acts as insurance for landowners agricultural wage data for 257 districts in india for 1956 87 are used to test the predictions with rainfall as an instrument for agricultural productivity in districts with fewer banks or higher migration costs the wage is much more responsive to fluctuations in productivity

alleviating soil erosion pollution stock externalities alternative roles for government abstract this paper addresses two temporal externalities due to agriculture soil erosion and related pollution the possibility of decentralization of decisions the appropriate role of a resource manager and the efficiency of alternative policies are examined using traditional welfare economics concepts for a two sector model of rural urban linkage three alternative types of policies can be socially efficient but imply different involvement by government and have different knowledge requirements a pigouvian policy requires full information a bargaining solution involves government only in setting an entitlement but it may require too much knowledge by rural households in terms of understanding dynamic environmental relationships a third way is that government and rural households be co producers of environmental goods this concept assigns government the responsibility for maintaining knowledge about environmental relationships and government is a participant in a market system that determines prices for environmental related goods

fatal fluctuations cyclicality in infant mortality in india this paper investigates the impact of aggregate income shocks on infant mortality in india and investigates likely mechanisms a recent oecd dominated literature reports the provocative finding that mortality at most ages is pro cyclical similar analyses for poorer countries are scarce and both income risk and mortality risk are greater in poor countries this paper uses data and methods designed to avoid some of the specification problems in previous studies and it explores mechanisms and extensions that have not been previously considered it uses individual data on infant mortality for about 150 000 children born in 1970 1997 merged by cohort and state of birth with a state panel containing information on aggregate income identification rests upon comparing the effects of annual deviations in income from trend on the mortality risks of children born at different times to the same mother conditional upon a number of state time varying covariates including rainshocks and state social expenditure rural infant mortality is counter cyclical the elasticity being about 0 33 this is despite the finding that relatively high risk women avert birth or suffer fetal loss in recessions it seems in part related to recessions stimulating distress labor amongst mothers in contrast to the case in richer countries where they discourage labor market participation health care seeking declines in recessions and this appears to be related to the opportunity cost of maternal time disaggregation reveals that the average results are driven by rural households in which the mother is uneducated or had her first birth in teenage and that it is only girls that are at risk boys are protected from income shocks exposure to poor conditions in the fetal and neonatal period appears to have a larger effect on infant mortality than similar exposure in the postneonatal period